Support for making Pauline henotic unity the fulcrum of Christian ecumenism in Nigeria

Paul uses the word ἑνότης twice in Ephesians (4:3, 13), and quite strangely, those are the only two places where the feminine noun features in the whole of the New Testament. In the two passages where they appear, they both relate to invisible unity, the unity of the Spirit that produces a common faith and knowledge of the Son of God – εἰς τὴν ἑνότητα τῆς πίστεως καὶ τῆς ἐπιγνώσεως τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ. Such unity suggests that ecumenism amongst Christian denominations is not only a possibility, it is also a necessity as far as we all profess one Christ. This unity is however far from ecclesiological unionism. Considering that the church appears weak from the outside when its diverse lines of doctrine, sacraments and ministerial ethics are emphasised. This suggests that a reasonable antidote would be the emphasis on the philosophy of unity amidst our diversity especially to the hearing of non-Christians.Contribution: This study makes firm the belief that Christianity is formed on divergent traditions that produced various strands of practices, which in turn produce different Christian sects and denominations, and a reverse is not possible. It then suggests a bonding in faith through the invisibility of henotic unity, which the pericope suggests. This will help the church to amass a stronger defence politically and structurally against rival religions and social organisations even in the midst of doctrinal differences.

Big data in Russian linguistics?

Summary With the advent of large web-based corpora, Russian linguistics steps into the era of “big data”. But how useful are large datasets in our field? What are the advantages? Which problems arise? The present study seeks to shed light on these questions based on an investigation of the Russian paucal construction in the RuTenTen corpus, a web-based corpus with more than ten billion words. The focus is on the choice between adjectives in the nominative (dve/tri/četyre starye knigi) and genitive (dve/tri/četyre staryx knigi) in paucal constructions with the numerals dve, tri or četyre and a feminine noun. Three generalizations emerge. First, the large RuTenTen dataset enables us to identify predictors that could not be explored in smaller corpora. In particular, it is shown that predicates, modifiers, prepositions and word-order affect the case of the adjective. Second, we identify situations where the RuTenTen data cannot be straightforwardly reconciled with findings from earlier studies or there appear to be discrepancies between different statistical models. In such cases, further research is called for. The effect of the numeral (dve, tri vs. četyre) and verbal government are relevant examples. Third, it is shown that adjectives in the nominative have more easily learnable predictors that cover larger classes of examples and show clearer preferences for the relevant case. It is therefore suggested that nominative adjectives have the potential to outcompete adjectives in the genitive over time. Although these three generalizations are valuable additions to our knowledge of Russian paucal constructions, three problems arise. Large internet-based corpora like the RuTenTen corpus (a) are not balanced, (b) involve a certain amount of “noise”, and (c) do not provide metadata. As a consequence of this, it is argued, it may be wise to exercise some caution with regard to conclusions based on “big data”.

The incomplete story of feminine gender loss in Northwestern Latvian dialects

The aim of this paper is to show that Northwestern Latvian dialects (also called Tamian) are insufficiently characterized by placing them on a simple linear hierarchy of feminine gender loss, which is how they are traditionally approached in Latvian dialectology. While Lithuanian and Central and High Latvian dialects all have very similar and fairly canonical gender systems, various Northwestern Latvian dialects display a wealth of underexplored non-canonical gender properties, such as the reactivated topic marker gender relic, honorific feminine gender, pronominal adjectives behaving differently from attributive adjectives, the noun ‘boy’ turning into a hybrid feminine noun, and a third controller gender restricted to some diminutives. Feminine gender loss is traditionally explained by Livonian (Finnic) substrate. It is shown in this paper that the developments in NW Latvian have multiple causes, one of them being apocope (loss of short vowels in final syllables), a common feature of NW Latvian dialects which prompted many developments making NW Latvian different from Central Latvian dialects and which is also ultimately due to language contact. Apocope and other developments made the system more complex. The non-canonical gender properties described in this paper are the effect of subsequent developments reducing system complexity again.

New replacement name for Tricella Catalano & Dietrich, 2017 (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae: Typhlocybinae)

We recently established the leafhopper genus Tricella with the type species Tricella antonellae from Ecuador (Catalano & Dietrich 2017). Unfortunately, Tricella n.gen is junior homonym of Tricella Daniels, 1975 (Diptera). Therefore, we propose a new replacement name Carpaneura nom. nov. for Tricella Catalano & Dietrich, 2017 as required by Article 60 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The genus is named in honor of the first author's husband, Pablo Carpane. The name combines his family name with the suffix of the type genus of the tribe and is treated as a feminine noun. Replacement of the junior homonym also requires the following new combination for the originally designated type species: Carpaneura antonellae (Catalano & Dietrich), comb. nov.

The Distribution of the Suffixes ‑ica and ‑ka with Emphasis on Feminine Derivation

This article is based on a pilot study of the appearance of the suffixes ‑ica and ‑ka with variants in word-formational semantic groups based on material from the Standard Slovenian Dictionary (SSKJ) and the Gigafid corpus. The study showed that the two suffixes are used to form feminine nouns in 38% of cases in SSKJ and 37% of cases in the corpus. For a more detailed analysis, additional material was therefore extracted from the work New Slovenian Vocabulary and the bachelor’s thesis Newly Coined Words for Designating People in Slovenian in order to determine which suffix is more frequent in feminine noun formation.

Death Masks in Tolstoi

Tolstoi made the accurate and poetic description of death a literary problem to be solved: how does a writer use the resources of language to describe the actual sensation of dying, an experience which the living can never fully comprehend? Experimenting with various linguistic means to create and use ambiguity, Tolstoi worked on a solution to this problem over many years in Childhood, Sevastopol Tales, “Three Deaths,” War and Peace, “Notes of a Madman,” and The Death of Ivan ll'ich. There are critics who feel that his achievement in this area is virtually unsurpassed; a recent book on death in world literature devotes more attention and praise to Tolstoi than to any other writer.The most powerful of all death scenes in Tolstoi's fiction is the one that portrays Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace. The specter of death that Andrei sees in a dream, a substantiation of his fear of dying, is designated simply by the neuter pronoun ono (it). Konstantin Leont'ev was struck by this ono which he felt was so terrifying and mysterious that it could be identified with death itself. What makes ono so immediately striking is that although it is a neuter form, it is used intentionally (by being underlined) to refer directly to the word smert' (death), which is a feminine noun.

Callimachus, Aetia Fr. 1.9–12

Both and are guaranteed by the London scholia (Pfeiffer vol. i, p.3), so the gap is reduced to the tantalizingly small one of a monosyllabic feminine noun in the accusative case, most probably of four letters. The number of possibilities cannot be unlimited. My own suggestion must necessarily remain in limbo in the present state of our knowledge concerning the poet or poets whom Callimachus is talking about, but at least it seems to me less bizarre than other restorations currently in the field.