This obituary discusses the contributions of late historian, Rifa'at Abou-El-Haj (1933-2022), to field Ottoman History. It describes influence his scholarship on growing literature early-modern Empire. also references mentorship graduate students and signficance critical approach in field.

Traditionally, literacy, and speech production have been investigated separately. Studies of development demonstrate that children are able to meet the challenge of language learning across modalities, and that adults may experience difficulties in one or both modalities. Yet, it is rare to find a conceptual connection between these two processes. I argue that speaking and reading actually shar...

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic cha...

Some scholars have hypothesized that writing style, the special language of writing, is acquired, or subconsciously absorbed, through reading (Krashen, 1984, 2004; Smith, 1988, 2004). The language of writing, it is argued, is too complex to be consciously learned, and there are compelling case histories of those who developed high levels of competence in the written language through reading alo...