Arts

18 Nov 09

Professor Martin Maiden is the current Chair of the Romance Languages.

The University is celebrating the centenary of the Chair of the Romance Languages on Friday with a special lecture and exhibition.

Oxford was the first, and remains the only, university in Britain to have an established Chair of the Romance Languages. The 'Romance languages' are those languages historically descended from Latin, notably Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French and Romanian, but there are also countless lesser-known languages and dialects.

Professor Martin Maiden is the current holder of a post that has seen eight previous postholders, since Herman Oelsner first held it in 1909. The tradition of research in Romance linguistics and philology nurtured by these scholars continues to flourish.

Professor Maiden said: 'The importance of Romance linguistics today, and its great strength, lies in its possibly unique capacity to deploy evidence from multiple related languages, from multiple stages in their history, and from multiple types of attestation, as a means of throwing light on the mechanisms by which languages change through time.

'It is, in other words, intimately linked with general linguistics and particularly historical linguistics. The goal of the Professor of the Romance Languages must be to acquaint general linguistic theory with the treasure house of data contained in the Romance languages, and to ensure that our continuing exploration of the Romance languages is informed by general linguistic theory.'

Professor Maiden believes that 100 years on, the University can claim to have gone a long way to meeting this ideal. Oxford's Research Centre for Romance Linguistics, established in 2007, brings together more than 20 scholars working on a broad range of aspects of the Romance languages (from textual philology to phonology to syntax to morphology), and publications in recent years have covered almost every geographical area of the Romance languages (including, latterly, Dalmatian and Romanian).

Until 2008, the Chair was associated exclusively with the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages; but with the creation of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics last year, the Chair now embraces both Faculties, a reflection of the fact that teaching and research in Romance linguistics deals with the history and structure of medieval and modern languages, yet is continually informed by, and contributes to, general linguistic theory.

To celebrate the centenary, Professor Michele Loporcaro of the Romanisches Seminar, University of Zurich will give a public lecture on The Future of Linguistics at 5pm on Friday 20 November in the Main Hall of the Taylor Institution. His talk will be of interest to non-specialists as well as an academic audience.

His research and publications focus on the history and structure of the dialects of Italy, but include the whole span of the Romance languages. Few linguists have ever had such a profound and extensive knowledge of the Romance languages as Professor Loporcaro. As well as numerous visiting professorships, he also holds a wide range of editorships and consultancies, including a consultancy to the project on historical Romance verb morphology currently under way in Oxford.

There will also be an exhibition in the Taylor Institution Library of books and linguistic atlases in Romance linguistics, from 20th November until 20th January.