What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.

This volume grew out of the workshop Writing Language, held at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen. The papers represent several lines of research into the intricate relation between writing and spoken language: Theoretical and computational linguists discuss the models that explain why orthographies are the way they are and the constraints that hold between writing and speaking a language; researchers in special education deal with the question of how certain aspects of orthography can be learned; and psycholinguists discuss aspects of language processing affected by variation in orthographies.

An important aspect of the analysis of written language is to explain its relationship to spoken language. The volume focuses on how morphology influences forms of spelling. It brings together 8 papers, including a review of the historical development of German and Dutch orthography, a paper about the possibilities for marking morphological structure that exist in German spelling, and about the effects of such marking on the process of reading.

Graphematics is the part of a theory of writing systems that refers to the relationship between written forms and sound forms. Essentially, the point at issue is how written forms can be represented in sound. Accordingly, the study examines the phonetic correspondence potential of all the letters of the German alphabet, as well as the lengthening and sharpening phenomena reflected in the system of written German. The study formulates essential requirements for an analysis of orthography and provides relevant arguments for debates on spelling and other reforms.

Der Band beleuchtet unterschiedliche Teilbereiche des deutschen Sprachgebrauchs. Unter sprachkritischer Perspektive betrachten die Autorinnen und Autoren vergangene und gegenwartige Aspekte des Wandels und der sprachlichen Variation prufend. Die Untersuchung des Sprachgebrauchs kann praktische Auswirkungen haben, wie die Bereiche forensische Linguistik, Terminologie von Fachsprachen und Namenforschung zeigen. Den Gebrauch der Sprache in literarischen Texten demonstrieren die Beitragerinnen und Beitrager anhand der Bibel, an mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Parzival, an rhetorischen Figuren bei Lessing und fur den Schulkontext an Gegenwartsliteratur. Zwei essayistische Ausblicke auf und auf Internetkommunikation beschliessen den Rundblick.

Skandale als aufsehenerregende AErgernisse sind Einfallstore fur die Beschaftigung mit Themen verschiedenster Art. Dieser Band versammelt in 16 von verschiedenen Autoren verfassten Kapiteln Skandale aus dem Umfeld der Sprache. Affaren zwischen Sprachakteuren fuhren Chomsky und Skinner zusammen ebenso wie Heine und Platen sowie Hoffmann von Fallersleben und die Bruder Grimm. Im Innern der Sprache stossen sich Skandalforscher an verbotenen Woertern, an der kurzschlussigen Gleichsetzung von Genus und Geschlecht und an der mangelhaften linguistischen Fundierung der Orthographiereform. Die Realitat des Englischunterrichts in Grundschulen wie auch der drohende Muttersprachenverlust bei Migranten lassen die Frage aufkommen, ob Individuen im Dickicht zwischen den Sprachen verlorenzugehen drohen.

What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated – from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant’s vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space – an astro-culture – in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.