UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies

This paper focuses on the use of demonstrative ten in modification of proper nouns, in examples such as ty Liblice or ta Praha. This is a topic that has eluded systematic study in the past, due to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient sample size for a phenomenon that occurs sporadically and primarily in spoken speech. Occasional examples can be found in literary stylizations of dialogue, but generally at wide intervals that prevent efficient searches. In addition, literary stylizations do not necessarily reflect natural spoken language (Gammelgaard 1997, Bermel 2000, and others). The Czech National Corpus provides a remedy to these issues, with its three purely oral corpora (Oral2006, PMK and BMK) that represent both a variety of spoken situation types, and speakers with a variety of demographical features (age, level of education, region of residence). Oral2006 alone contains over 2000 examples of ten + proper noun (in various declensional and gendered forms), while PMK and BMK contribute approximately a thousand.1 In this study I address two main issues: 1) the basic functions of demonstrative modified proper nouns, and 2) the combinatorial possibilities of demonstrative modified proper nouns with other spoken features.

In the last fifteen years to twenty years there has been an extraordinary upsurge of interest in Jewish history in Germany. For a long time attention was focused almost entirely on questions of persecution, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; but since the 1980s there has been more wide-ranging and also more intensive preoccupation with Jewish history. However, this applies only to a very limited extent to the Jewish communities in Germany, which have now grown again. At least half the present members are Russian immigrants who have arrived in the past twenty years; only a few members are still connected through their family background to German-Jewish history of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The new interest in Jewish history stems very largely from educated non-Jews - in Germany they are the main audience for the public events and publications on this theme, and most of the scholars, writers, journalists and cultural managers working in this field are also recruited from this group. Not only in the USA but also in Germany, though on a much smaller scale, the number of professorships and institutes for Jewish history and culture has risen considerably, and students’ interest in these subjects continues to grow. The workshops for doctoral candidates in German-Jewish history spanning several days which I conducted on behalf of the Leo Baeck Institute from 1991 to 1999 were attended by a total of 133 doctoral candidates from 45 German and 12 foreign universities. These included - with neighbouring disciplines taken into account - almost 110 dissertation projects in the field of modern German-Jewish history. This work is now being continued, no less successfully, by Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Munich University.

Globalization is probably the most often used term in social sciences nowadays. Several colleagues, however, maintain that there is nothing new in globalization. The entire early modern and modern history were periods of permanent development of globalization, especially after the discoveries, building colonial empires, later railroads, and establishing laissez-fair system an the international gold standard. The world, no doubt about it, became more international, if you want global all the time.