Niels Schoubben
Postdoc
- Name
- Dr. N. Schoubben MA
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2727
- n.schoubben@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0002-1190-1838
Niels Schoubben is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot). As a linguist-cum-philologist, he studies the written remains of extinct Central Asian languages in order to uncover words and grammatical patterns borrowed from one ancient language into the other. In his PhD dissertation (defended in 2024), he focused on language contact between Niya Prakrit (a form of Gāndhārī) and Bactrian; currently, he is investigating Gāndhārī loanwords into Khotanese and Tocharian.
More information about Niels Schoubben
Fields of interest
- Historical linguistics
- Language Contact
- Philology
- Middle Indo-Aryan and Sanskrit
- Middle Iranian
- Tocharian
- Ancient and Medieval Greek
Research
Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University, where I am part of the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Michaël Peyrot). Before this, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on “Traces of language contact: Bactrian and other foreign elements”, also at Leiden University. Having a background in classics, Indology, and comparative philology, I study South and Central Asian languages and texts dating to the first millennium before and after the start of the common era. The languages I like to approach from the perspective of contact linguistics and historical (socio)linguistics; the texts I study with traditional philological methods. During the past years, Gāndhārī and Bactrian have been the languages that played the most prominent part in my research. For my postdoctoral research, I am additionally working on Khotanese and Tocharian, in particular on the Gāndhārī loanwords found in these languages. My academic interests extend, however, beyond the purely linguistic to also include Indian religions and literature; textual criticism as applied to Greek grammatical treatises; and the history of 19th- and 20th-century philological scholarship.
CV
| 2024 - present | Postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” |
| 2019 - 2024 | PhD student at Leiden University supervised by Prof. Peyrot and Prof. Lubotsky (dissertation on language contact between Niya Prakrit and Bactrian; defence 6 November 2024; cum laude) |
| 2018 - 2019 | MA Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, Leiden University (MA thesis on the phoneme /l/ in Ṛgvedic Sanskrit; summa cum laude) |
| 2018 - 2019 | MA Classics & Ancient Civilizations: Classics, Leiden University (MA thesis on Homeric Greek lexicography; cum laude) |
| 2017 - 2018 | MA Languages & Linguistics: Latin-Greek, Ghent University (MA thesis on the Homeric hexameter; extra courses in Classical Indology; summa cum laude with special congratulations) |
| 2014 - 2017 | BA Languages & Linguistics: Latin-Greek, Ghent University (BA thesis on language contact in the Greek Kandahar inscriptions; extra courses in Sanskrit; summa cum laude) |
Grants and awards
- 2021: Best MA thesis in Indo-European Linguistics 2020. Awarded by the Indogermanische Gesellschaft.
- 2018: Best MA thesis in Classics 2017-2018 at Ghent University. Awarded by the Ghent Institute for Classical Studies (GIKS).
Postdoc
- Faculty of Humanities
- Leiden Univ Centre for Linguistics
- LUCL VIET
- Schoubben N. (6 November 2024), Traces of language contact in Niya Prakrit: Bactrian and other foreign elements (Dissertatie. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University). Supervisor(s): Peyrot M. & Lubotsky A.
- Schoubben N. (2023), The Iranian sound change *w- > *γw- in the Indo-Iranian borderlands and a new etymology for Gāndhārī and Sanskrit guśura(ka)-, Iran and the Caucasus 27(3): 285-298.
- Schoubben N., Koning J., Velthoven B.R.W. van & Probert P. (2023), Of tortoise necks and dialects: a new edition of the Grammaticus Leidensis, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 116(3): 929-964.
- Schoubben N. (2022), The son of the king: Iranistic notes on Gāndhārī kṣabura, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 172(1): 149-153.
- Schoubben N. (2022), Tu quoque?! : On the second person pronoun tusya (tus̱a) and the second person verbal ending -tu (-du) in Niya Prakrit, Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 9(1-2): 1-27.
- Schoubben N. (2022), Linguistic evidence for Kuṣāṇa trade routes: Bactrian *λιρτο ‘load, cargo’ and Sanskrit lardayati ‘to load’, Indogermanische Forschungen 127(1): 343-357.
- Schoubben N. (2021) Book review of [Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli] by [Bhikkhu Bodhi]. Review of: Bodhi B. (2020), Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli. Somerville: Wisdom Publications. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 20: 187-192.
- Schoubben N. (2021), Accent sign matters: the Niya prakrit grapheme < ḱ > and its connection to Bactrian < Þκ >, Journal Asiatique 309(1): 47-59.
- Dragoni F., Schoubben N. & Peyrot M. (2020), The Formal Kharoṣṭhī script from the Northern Tarim Basin in Northwest China may write an Iranian language, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 73(3): 335-373.
- Schoubben N. (30 July 2019), Hippocrene reeks over de Ṛgveda: 1. Introductie. [blog entry].
- Schoubben N. (2018), Review of: Gunkel Dieter & Hackstein Olav (2018), Language & Meter. Brill Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics no. 18. Leiden: Brill. Journal of Indo-European Studies 46(3-4): 472-489.
- Schoubben N. (2018), À la grecque comme à la grecque - The Greek Kandahar Inscriptions as a case study in Indo-Greek language contact during the Hellenistic Period, Indologica Taurinensia 43-44: 79-118.