Verbum – Analecta Neolatina

Words fail us: The crisis of language

2026-02-17T08:21:31+00:00

Modernity has ushered in an increasing detachment from life; a divorce of sorts is taking place between the individual and the cultural context. Given certain thoughts and feelings, words fail us. It seems that we fail to communicate, to understand, to carve significance beyond the text. I write this manuscript as a feature of contemporary Zeitgeist, as a response to modern uncertainties about humanity. My belief is that the contract between language and reality is broken; thus, we lost our only hope to make contact with reality.

Sermons without borders

2026-01-19T10:18:54+00:00

The work of the Transylvanian bishop and author András Illyés (1639–1712) is unique in the early Hungarian literature in two respects: first, because of the completeness of the material he published, and second, because of his work as a translator and compiler. A further feature of Illyés’s use of sources is that, with the exception of his second thematic collection, he drew increasingly on the works of Pietro Rota, and did so in an increasingly conscious and structured way. Illyés’s collection of sermons thus contains one hundred and twenty-seven sermons in Hungarian for which Pietro Rota was the source.

El Regimiento de Infantería “Soria” 9, introspección sobre el más antiguo y su derecho a ser “Benemérito” reconocido

2026-01-19T10:20:36+00:00

The “Soria” 9 Infantry Regiment, based on the island of Fuerteventura, is considered as the oldest Infantry unit in the West, with a long record in various scenarios and continents, both in combat and in the service of peace. Recently, there has been talk of granting it the title of “Benemérito de la Patria,” and including it on its coat of arms. This is an almost forgotten distinction, dating back to the early 19th century, recognising particularly meritorious service to the Homeland. It would join the “Tenerife” 49, making the Canary Islands one of the autonomous communities with the most recipients of this distinction. The reasons for this recognition were not thoroughly studied, other than referring to the aforementioned record. The present article has researched and delved into these reasons, examining the legitimacy of the award. The issue is not without complexities, as it is an almost extinct distinction.

Unveiling convergence: Prosody and speech rhythms of the tu vois discourse marker across French regions

2025-03-29T10:17:54+00:00

This paper outlines an approach to determine the prosodic characteristics of a discursive marker (tu vois ‘you see’ and its past tensed variant t’as vu ‘you saw’) commonly used in different non-standard French variations, and the eventual dialectal similarities or differences between authentic speakers from the suburbs of Paris and Marseille. This study consists of a descriptive and a comparative analysis leaning on spontaneous speech samples. These samples provide a rich source of data, enabling us to make two key assertions. Firstly, our examination of the prosodic features of the discourse marker reveals a notable consistency among them. Secondly, our comparative analysis highlights an intriguing finding: despite examining two distinct dialects, we observed no significant difference between the suprasegmental features present in each. This implies a level of similarity or convergence in the overarching suprasegmental aspects of speech between the two dialects under investigation.

Sur la complémentarité de l’adaptation et de la résilience des emprunts lexicaux

2026-01-15T12:33:41+00:00

The adaptation of borrowings has long been a focus of contact linguistics, examined as a process of submission, assimilation, nativization, or morphologization of lexical items. By contrast, resistance and resilience – understood as forms of the receiving language’s “self-defense” – have received little scholarly attention and remain largely undertheorized. This study investigates the modalities of resilience in the case of Gallicisms in Slovak. Any attempt to systematize the factors underlying resilience, conceived as a complementary and inseparable counterpart of adaptation, must take into account a heterogeneous set of often interrelated criteria, including formal, temporal, thematic, and etymological dimensions. Nevertheless, the dynamics of lexical evolution and innovation cannot fully account for the irregularities observed in Slovak Gallicisms, as illustrated by the lexemes niveau and šapito.

La representación de género en la traducción automática: un análisis del húngaro al español

2026-07-21T14:44:10+00:00

The article examines how Google Translate translates Hungarian sentences into Spanish, considering that Hungarian has no grammatical gender. The objective is to analyze whether the Translator associates professions and activities with specific genders when translating, which could reveal sexist biases in its results. The methodology used consists of typing sentences in Hungarian (without distinction of gender in their origin) of the type ő tanár which means ‘he/she is a teacher’ and observing in which gender they are translated into Spanish. In this way, we seek to identify whether the translator tends to assign roles, occupations or actions to a particular gender. We also examine how the translator handles the use of the generic masculine plural. This analysis helps to highlight possible implicit tendencies in the tool’s artificial intelligence that could perpetuate gender stereotypes in its translations.

Maria Giovanna Mancini: Attraverso territorio e scultura

2026-07-21T14:51:28+00:00

Maria Giovanna Mancini: Attraverso territorio e scultura. Milano – Udine: Mimesis Edizione, 2025, 191 pp.

Hérode, Mariane et Salomé au regard des sources théâtrales et morales du début du XVIIe siècle : entre modèle sénéquien ou tempérance aristotélicienne

2024-10-11T09:25:19+00:00

The story of Herod, a tyrannical king and usurper of the kingdom of Judea, is told by Flavius Josephus in the Antiquities of the Jews. The beginning of the 17th century, influenced by neo-Stoic or Jesuit currents of thought, took a keen interest in human passions, particularly in relation to power. French Jesuit Nicolas Caussin devotes a chapter to the character of Herod entitled ‘The Unfortunate Ruler’ in La Cour Sainte which inspired Alexandre Hardy and Tristan L’Hermite in their tragedies. The influence of Senecan philosophy and theatre can be detected in the Baroque plays, but they are also influenced by the Aristotelian pœtic of the ‘middle hero’. The staging of exacerbated passions is gradually internalized over the decades for certain characters, the psychological analysis becomes more refined, the impact of court life is revealed and gives them relief and stature.

La réparation mesurée, une héroïne cornélienne inspiratrice de la paix sociale

2026-02-23T06:28:15+00:00

The passion for revenge, marked by a desire for retaliation and a quest for justice lies at the heart of the themes in theatre, mindsets, and morals of the early 17th century. Its interest, arising at the intersection of the establishment of legal models persist through successive decades. Its analyses are still the subject of contemporary research. One of the characters who perhaps embodies this apparent ambivalence between passion and quest for justice is Chimène in Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Le Cid from 1637. Her character, a young noblewoman of the 11th century, torn between passion and the quest for honour of the Spanish court and her feelings for the victor of the battles, The Cid, has become legendary. In Corneille’s tragedy Chimène not only passes through different stages of the female condition but also seems to invest the power of a judicial function, inherent to a modern state.

Ficción y realidad en las primeras novelas femeninas negro-africanas de expresión francesa

2024-10-10T15:36:26+00:00

The literary production of the first generation of black-African women writers in the French language consists of a dozen stories written in the first person and characterised by their eminently testimonial vocation. Despite being an emerging literature, the works deal with highly controversial themes such as polygamous marriage, forced marriage and imposed motherhood. Although they fall, at least from a formal point of view, within the realm of the novel – and therefore of fiction – half of these texts present very significant elements of indefiniteness, including the high presence of absent, ambiguous or contradictory reading pacts, the dilation of character identification and, finally, the manifest biographical similarity between the women writers and their protagonists. Far from being accidental, this elimination of the frontiers that separate reality from fiction constitutes a premeditated strategy that allows the writers to defy social taboos by shielding themselves in the space of fiction and, at the same time, arousing in the reader a strong impression of the veracity of what is told.