Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: Language and Difference in Herodotus
By Edward Nolan | November 22, 2021
Classical Greeks often articulated a worldview that divided the world between Greeks and all other ethnic groups. This fundamental distinction served to justify war and slavery. The tragedian Aeschylus portrays non-Greeks as slavish and decadent in his Persians. Aristotle thought enslaving non-Greeks was a just cause for waging war (Politics 7.15.21). The Greeks called non-Greeks barbaroi, or “barbarians,” because of the unintelligible sounds of their foreign languages (they said bar bar). The historian Herodotus has long been a central figure in scholarly discourse about the creation and articulation of the boundary between Greeks and others.
Blog: Greek and Roman "Aliens"
By William Short | March 13, 2017
Arrival has gotten serious buzz in academic circles, and for good reason. The premise of the film is the idea that the language you speak shapes the kind of thoughts you can have. Formally, that idea is called the “linguistic relativity hypothesis” or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and the film thus brings one of the more controversial and intriguing theories in the scholarly study of language before the popular imagination. It is an idea that could fundamentally change what we think we know about the ancient world.