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Les Jeudis de Mundolingua

Chaque troisième jeudi du mois à 19h30, une soirée spéciale vous attend à Mundolingua !

SoiréeS de mars 2024 :

Just as exotic as we are

Soirée en anglais

Comme vous êtes nombreux à le savoir, tous les troisièmes jeudis de chaque mois à 19h30 nous organisons une soirée autour d’un thème se rapportant au vaste monde des langues. 
Rendez-vous au musée Mundolingua le jeudi 21 mars à 19h30
10 rue Servandoni
75006 Paris.

Le nombre de places étant limité, n’hésitez pas à réserver :

soit par téléphone au : 01 56 81 65 79
soit par mail : contact@mundolingua.org
Tarif : 5 €/personne (entrée + apéro). 

 Just as exotic as we are:

  21st of March

We all know that foreign languages are different. But most of them are ‘differently different’ than our school knowledge would lead us to expect. And it’s not just the languages as such: the people who speak them also have widely diverging outlooks on many linguistic questions. Who’s wrong, who’s right? No-one can tell: Us and Them are equally exotic.

Gaston Dorren is the author of the linguistic bestsellers Lingo and Babel, both of which have been translated into a dozen or more languages, not including French. Like many of his fellow Dutchmen, he’s fluent in several languages, not including French. He has five given names, all of them French.

!!! Politeness in Grammar : 6th of March 

En raison de la forte demande pour assister à la soirée sur l’expression de la politesse dans la grammaire et du nombre de personnes que nous avons dû refuser le jeudi 15 février, du fait du manque de place, nous avons décidé avec Horst, l’intervenant, de réitérer son intervention. Elle aura lieu cette fois un mercredi soir, le 6 mars à 19h30, pour nos abonnés qui ne peuvent pas venir le jeudi soir.  La soirée sera de nouveau en anglais, et nous allons essayer de la faire également en zoom pour ceux qui sont loin.

Due to the large demand for our February soirée on Politeness in Grammar and the number of people we had to refuse due to the lack of space, we have decided together with the speaker Horst to redo the soirée, and this time on a Wednesday evening, the 6th of March, since there are a number of our subscribers who cannot come on Thursday evenings. The « rerun » will again be in English and we will endeavour to provide a zoom link for those who are far away.

All cultures seem to feel a need to organise sociability through language. Hence, all languages provide means to differentiate between (different types of) interlocutors, but also to maintain social cohesion through the expression of ‘friendliness’. Quite a few languages, though, go further in that, they incorporate such politeness features into their grammatical systems.

In my presentation, I will first give an overview of the various grammatical means that are employed in the languages of the world in order to express politeness, providing examples from Japanese, from Classical Nahuatl and other languages. I will then look at a range of European languages and their ways of expressing politeness through the use of different pronouns of address. In this context I will trace the history of polite address in German and also look at non-standard varieties of French. It will turn out that grammar proper does indeed play a role in the expression of politeness in European languages, even though to a lesser degree than elsewhere.

Horst Simon is Professor of Historical Linguistics at Freie Universität Berlin. (Before that he taught at King’s College London and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He was Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Vienna as well as Visiting Professor at Peking University and various other institutions in China and in Europe). His current larger projects include the study of variation in politeness phenomena in German in Central Europe, a grammatical description of the German variety in Namibia in the context of intense multilingualism, and a collection and analysis of historical foreign language textbooks in Early Modern Europe. Among others, he is managing editor of the book series “Topics in Address Research”, published by Benjamins (Amsterdam/Philadelphia).

Venez nombreuses et nombreux partager ce moment ensemble avec nous !  
Bien cordialement,
 l’équipe de Mundolingua.

IMPORTANT

Le nombre de places étant limité, n’hésitez pas à réserver :
01 56 81 65 79
contact@mundolingua.org
Tarif : 5 €/personne