The two closely related Celtic languages Breton and Welsh represent an interesting comparative laboratory for exploring language contact phenomena, since much of the period of their divergence from a common ancestor has been accompanied by intense language contact: Breton with French, and Welsh with English. A number of the ways that the modern forms of the two Celtic languages differ from each other, including reflexive and reciprocal constructions and the encoding of motion events, can be seen as cases in which the two languages have, over time, moved in the direction of aligning their patterns with those of French and English respectively, in a process of convergent evolution which is distinct from, though related to, grammatical borrowing. In neither modern language do the patterns match those of the contact language perfectly, but the isomorphy with French and English is nonetheless striking, especially when seen against the background of other effects of intense contact in these languages.

In fall 1914, as the Kaiser’s armies invaded towns in the western territories of the Imperial Russian Empire known as Russian Poland (now eastern Poland and southern Lithuania), the Russian government, for the first time, forcibly exiled thousands its own citizens in the region into interior Russia, declaring them a suspect group. The exiles consisted mainly of virtually the entire minority population of Russian Germans in Russian Poland. The ancestors of most had been Russian subjects for at least a century, and many of the exiles had served in the Imperial Russian Army themselves, some as career officers. The Council of Ministers in St. Petersburg, however, feared that this population held loyalties to the German lands and would collaborate with the German armies.

The Russian provincial military police were assigned the task of rounding up all “Germans”, confiscating their property, and putting them on overcrowded trains to Kazan and other interior Russian towns that were not equipped to handle the enormous influx of migrants from Russian Poland. This task caused the police much concern, because many individuals who spoke Polish with their families at home and considered themselves Polish had German surnames. Moreover, some individuals with Polish, Lithuanian, or Russian surnames had been baptized in German-language Lutheran churches. A rich trove of formerly secret police files on the resettlement of the Russian Germans, kept earlier at the Museum of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in Moscow and now located in the National Historical Museum of Lithuania and the Pułtusk Historical Archive in Poland, contains a great deal of internal police correspondence on what criteria should be followed for identifying an individual as “German” for purposes of the resettlement of Russian Germans. Based on the police correspondence, witness statements in treason investigations, and a first-hand report in the archives by a Russian police officer trapped in the Kałwaria during the German occupation, this presentation covers the criterion for “Germanness” that was eventually issued by the Russian Council of Ministers, the self-identity of those who were officially identified as “German”, and the perceptions of their Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Jewish, and Russian neighbors regarding their political loyalties. 

Cynthia Vakareliyska holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, and is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon, where she teaches Slavic and general linguistics. Her research specialization are historical Slavic linguistics and medieval Slavic manuscript studies. Her 2008 book The Curzon Gospel received the 2009 AATSEEL book prize for Slavic linguistics, the 2009 Bulgarian Studies Association book prize, and the 2010 Early Slavic Studies Distinguished Scholarship award. Her most recent book, Lithuanian Root List, is in press with Slavica Publishers. She is currently writing a book on the Russian Germans in Russian Poland, based on her study of archive documents in Lithuanian and Polish archives over the past 15 years.

Most studies of language and confessional minorities focus on the self-identity, singular, of members of a minority community. Some minority populations, however, have two or more concurrent language, cultural, and ethnic self-identities (although usually only one confessional self-identity). This talk examines the self-perceptions of an understudied minority population, the Lutheran Russian Germans living in the western part of the Russian Empire known as Congress Poland or “Russian Poland” (now eastern Poland and southern Lithuania) during the 19th and early 20th centuries, before they were forcibly resettled by the Russian government into interior Russia during World War One.

The Russian Germans, also known as “German Russians,” were Russian citizens, the descendants of German artisans who had migrated to Russia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by invitation of Catherine the Great and Paul I. Those in Russian Poland lived mostly in integrated communities together with Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Belarusians, and Russians. Most were trilingual in Polish, Russian, and Low German, with some knowing Lithuanian as well. Based on documents in Lithuanian and Polish archives and a private collection in the U.S., the talk focuses on the Lutheran Russian German populations in the adjoining provinces of Suwałczyzna and Łomża (now Suvalkija in Lithuania and Mazowsze in Poland, respectively) and their adoption of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian cultural features, as reflected in their naming and signature practices, language choices, cuisine, and self-identity as a group during a period when the concept of ethnicity had not yet been developed in Russia.

Rough cut viewing about a half hour in length of a UK-student-created documentary film, followed by a panel discussion.  Viewing and discussion are open to the public, so bring a friend or two!

One of a group of Indo-European speaking peoples intrusive to Anatolia, the Hittites rose from a modest city state to establish first a kingdom on the central plateau and then an empire that fought with the kings of Babylon and Assyria, the Hurrians, and the pharaohs of Egypt for control of SE Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, and contended with one or more Mycenaean Greek kings over western Asia Minor. One of their many vassal states was Wilusa, certainly to be identified with Troy. The multiethnic Hittite kingdom absorbed heavy cultural influence from many peoples and played a role in transmitting Ancient Near Eastern culture to the Greeks. A combination of factors, including the assaults of the “Sea Peoples”, brought an end to the Hittite Empire shortly after 1200 BCE, but some former subordinate states inherited their name and culture and maintained a degree of independence for several centuries until conquered by the Assyrians. It is these “Neo-Hittite” states that are represented in the “Hittites” of the Old Testament.

One of a group of Indo-European speaking peoples intrusive to Anatolia, the Hittites rose from a modest city state to establish first a kingdom on the central plateau and then an empire that fought with the kings of Babylon and Assyria, the Hurrians, and the pharaohs of Egypt for control of SE Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, and contended with one or more Mycenaean Greek kings over western Asia Minor. One of their many vassal states was Wilusa, certainly to be identified with Troy. The multiethnic Hittite kingdom absorbed heavy cultural influence from many peoples and played a role in transmitting Ancient Near Eastern culture to the Greeks. A combination of factors, including the assaults of the “Sea Peoples”, brought an end to the Hittite Empire shortly after 1200 BCE, but some former subordinate states inherited their name and culture and maintained a degree of independence for several centuries until conquered by the Assyrians. It is these “Neo-Hittite” states that are represented in the “Hittites” of the Old Testament.

Although the functionally unmarked word order in Hittite is robustly SOV, many other word orders are well attested. In addition to some that are syntactically licensed and bear various discourse structure functions, there are also a number of quite puzzling configurations that involve discontinuous constituents and appear unmotivated in terms of discourse structure. Violations of well-known syntactic constraints suggest that these orders are phonologically motivated. Building on previous evidence that Hittite has “phrasal stress”, I will argue that many if not all such orders reflect: (1) that the primary accent in all Hittite phonological phrases (which mostly match syntactic phrases) falls on the leftmost constituent; (2) that some prosodically weak constituents (e.g., indefinite adjectives) require a phonological word as their immediate leftward host, while others (e.g., relative adjectives) require only a phonological phrase; (3) that the last two rules are violable, resulting in some “exceptions” to the dominant patterns. Further study is needed regarding what determines the “prosodically weak” status of some elements.