Professor Claire Bowern, Yale University
Biography
Claire Bowern is a historical linguist whose research is centered around language change and language documentation in Indigenous Australia. While her work touches many areas, the overarching question is how to characterize the nature of language change. Language change involves a complex interplay of universal properties of language acquisition and production and community-specific social factors; her research program looks at how to study this so we understand both the micro change(es) in progress and the macro change that leads to language families. She works with speakers of endangered languages, with archival sound and print materials, and she uses computational and phylogenetic methods. She is currently the editor of the journal Diachronica. She is past director of Yale’s Women Faculty Forum(Link is external), a gender equity group on campus. She has secondary appointments in Anthropology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is a member of the Cognitive Science faculty.
Keynote Address
Voynichese Orthographic Structure: The linguistics of sounds and writing, with implications for the Voynich Manuscript
Phonology is the study of sound systems. In this talk, I use insights from natural language phonologies to investigate predictions about the Voynich Manuscript's writing system.
Natural language writing systems (aka "orthographies") can encode different types of information about the sound systems of the languages they represent. Some languages (Latin, Spanish, Navajo) use alphabetic writing systems that fairly directly encodes the relevant sound categories of the language. Other systems (e.g. Arabic) represent more partial information. Still other systems represent morphemes (prefixes, roots, suffixes) or syllables. Because of the number of characters, Voynich writing is usually treated as more or less alphabetic, as witnessed by the EVA transliteration system.
There are a number of different claims about the "phonological" or "morphological" structure of Voynichese words, all of which are agnostic about the relationship between the orthographic structure, phonology, and morphology of the underlying language. In this talk, I aim to make some of these assumptions more explicit. I discuss the implications of Stolfi's Core-Mantle-Crust theory of Voynichese words, and whether it maps onto prefix-root-suffix or onset-nucleus-coda.
