Mr Ranjan Sen
Nationality: United Kingdom
Year: 2005
Subject Area: Arts and Humanities
The Foundation generously expressed enthusiasm for my avenue of research – the phonetics/phonology of Latin – at a critical time during my early academic musings. Towards the latter stages of the M. Phil. at the Oxford, I became eager to continue developing my methods in applying modern phonological, phonetic and other linguistic techniques to Latin. Wingate Scholarships’ support and subsequent continued interest (despite my being awarded external funding enabling my scholarship to be redistributed to other needy young researchers) was and is hugely appreciated.
After becoming a Wingate Scholar, I undertook a doctorate at Oxford. My research area is proving fruitful, and some results are reported in the Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics 2006, a volume of sixteen diverse papers I also co-edited. Furthermore, I have presented research at both linguistics and philology conferences in Manchester, Newcastle, Oslo and Oxford, and anticipate completing my degree in 2008.
Please find attached a photo of me in Rome. I am illustrating the use of the letter P instead of B in the word PLEPS (for plebs ‘people’) on a rainy day in the forum Romanum. The reason for the use of P is pretty straightforward (that’s how you’d pronounce it before S!), but it has some interesting implications for formulations of sound assimilation…