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Geoffrey Khanâs pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012â2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholarsâretired, established, and up and comingâwhose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Geoffrey Khanâs pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (2012â2025) as Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, brings together contributions from a vast and representative array of scholarsâretired, established, and up and comingâwhose work has been influenced by his vast intellectual legacy.
Despite the ubiquitous use of Greek by the Christian church of the late antique Southern Levant, many Christians in the region alsoâor onlyâspoke Aramaic. Today, this dialect, known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA), is relatively sparsely attested in the form of regional inscriptions and, particularly, in the form of vernacular translations of Greek biblical, liturgical and theological texts. These translations survive predominantly as undertexts within palimpsest manuscripts.
Codex Climaci Rescriptus (CCR) is one of the most important palimpsest manuscript sources for the recovery of CPA texts.
This Festschrift, Arabic in Context, is a tribute to the remarkable scholarly legacy of the Reverend Professor Martin R. Zammit. It celebrates his extensive contributions to the fields of Semitic Studies, Arabic linguistics, and comparative Semitic philology.
According to the standard periodisation of ancient Hebrew, the division of Biblical Hebrew as reflected in the Masoretic tradition is basically dichotomous: pre-exilic Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) versus post-Restoration Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). Within this paradigm, the chronolectal unity of CBH is rarely questionedâthis despite the reasonable expectation that the language of a corpus encompassing traditions of various ages and comprising works composed, edited, and transmitted over the course of centuries would show signs of diachronic development. From the perspective of historical evolution, CBH is remarkably homogenous. Within this apparent uniformity, however, there are indeed signs of historical development, sets of alternant features whose respective concentrations seem to divide CBH into two sub-chronolects. The most conspicuous typological division that emerges is between the CBH of the Pentateuch and that of the relevant Prophets and Writings. The present volume investigates a series of features that distinguish the two ostensible CBH sub-chronolects, weighs alternative explanations for distribution patterns that appear to have chronological significance, and considers broader implications for Hebrew diachrony and periodisation and for the composition of the Torah.
This edited volume brings together a diverse and rich set of contributions on the Arabian Peninsula. Ranging from history, field linguistics, and cultural studies these essays address the diversity of languages, ways of life, and natural environments that have marked the region throughout its history.
The consecutive tenses are fundamental in all descriptions of Classical Hebrew grammar. They are even basic to the textbooks on Biblical Hebrew. Being fundamental in the verbal system, and part of any beginnerâs grammar, they pose a serious problem to a linguistic understanding of the verbal system, since grammars describe an alternation of âformsâ or âtensesâ in double pairs: wayyiqáčol alternates with its âequivalentâ qaáčal, and wÉ-qaáčal alternates with its âequivalentâ yiqáčol. This âenigmaâ in the verbal system is handled in the book by recognising that the alternation of the consecutive tenses with other tenses, in the reality of the text, represents a linking of clauses. The âconsecutive tensesâ are clause-types with a natural language connective wa- directly followed by a finite verbal morpheme, a type of clause that expressed continuity in the earliest stage of Semitic. The commonly held assumption that there is a special âconsecutive wawâ is unwarranted. The use of the âconsecutiveâ clause-types in order to express discourse continuity indicates that Classical Hebrew has retained the old unmarked declarative word order of Semitic syntax. Seen in the light of recent research on the Tiberian reading tradition, the âconsecutiveâ wayyiqáčol can be analysed as a retention of the old Semitic past perfective *wa-yaqtul, which was pronounced wa-yiqáčol in Classical Hebrew. The âconsecutiveâ wÉ-qÄáčal (pronounced wa-qaáčal in the classical language) constitutes the result of an internal Hebrew development into a construction (in the sense of Joan Bybee) already foreshadowed in the earliest Northwest Semitic languages. The book understands the âconsecutive tensesâ as discourse continuity clauses, which typically form chains of main line clauses. Such chains can be interrupted by other types of clauses. This interruption is a clause linking that receives special attention in the interpretation of the Classical Hebrew verbal system. Chapter six presents a regenerated text linguistics founded on the new terminology.
This book explores the rich paremiological heritage of Jibbali/Ćáž„ÉrÉÌÌt, an endangered pre-literate language belonging to the Modern South Arabian sub-branch of Semitic, spoken by an ever-decreasing number of people in the Dhofar governorate of the Sultanate of Oman.
This volume undertakes a linguistic exploration of the endangered Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of Gabes, a coastal city situated in Southern Tunisia. Belonging to the category of sedentary North African dialects, this variety is now spoken by a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily in Israel and France.
Given the imminent extinction faced by many modern varieties of Judaeo-Arabic, including Jewish Gabes, the study's primary goal is to document and describe its linguistic nuances while reliable speakers are still accessible. Data for this comprehensive study were collected during fieldwork in Israel and France between December 2018 and March 2022.
This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qurâan in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qurâan translations. Mykhaylo Yakubovych provides a comprehensive historical overview of the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur'an, as well as exploring the impact of the burgeoning translation and dissemination of the holy book upon Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam. Backed by meticulous research and drawing on a wealth of sources, this work illuminates an essential facet of global Islamic culture and scholarly discourse.
This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH?
In the present book we survey six specific characteristics of a âstandard language ideologyâ that appear in both the writings of the Hebrew grammarians who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and the Arabic grammarians during the ÊżAbbasid period. Such striking lines of linguistic-ideological similarity suggest that it may not have been only grammatical concepts or literary genres that the medieval Hebrew grammarians inherited from the Arabic grammatical tradition, but a way of thinking about language as well.
What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs. Thinking about beliefs is suitable for communication analysis because beliefs are well-defined and measurable, allowing to differentiate between successful understandings and their less successful counterparts: misunderstandings.
This volume is the result of the 2021 session of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group of the Institute for Biblical Research, which addresses the history, relevance, and prospects of broad theoretical linguistic frameworks in the field of biblical studies. Cognitive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, complexity theory, and computational analysis are each allotted a chapter, outlining the key theoretical commitments of each approach, their major concepts and/or methods, and their important contributions to contemporary study of the biblical text.
In recent decades, the field of Biblical Hebrew philology and linguistics has been witness to a growing interest in the diverse traditions of Biblical Hebrew. Indeed, while there is a tendency for many students and scholars to conceive of Biblical Hebrew as equivalent with the Tiberian pointing of the Leningrad Codex as it appears in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), there are many other important reading traditions attested throughout history.
Delgado presents his view of Andalusi Hebrew metrics, as encountered in medieval manuals of Arabic and Hebrew metrics and scattered notes in the works of Andalusi Hebrew philologists. Whilst twentieth-century scholars spoke about the adaptation of Arabic metrics to Hebrew, he instead approaches these compositions by Andalusi Jews (10th-13th c.) as Arabic metrics written in Hebrew, thus emphasising how Hebrew poetry of the Andalusi Jews can help us to understand the general evolution of Arabic strophic poetry, and its experimental evolution, which is quite unlike classical and strophic Arabic poetry.
This volume explores an underappreciated feature of the standard Tiberian Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew, namely its composite nature. Focusing on cases of dissonance between the traditionâs written (consonantal) and reading (vocalic) components, the study shows that the Tiberian spelling and pronunciation traditions, though related, interdependent, and largely in harmony, at numerous points reflect distinct oral realisations of the biblical text.
The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic.
This volume brings together papers on topics relating to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We refer to this broadly in the title of the volume as the âMasoretic Traditionâ. The papers are innovative studies of a range of aspects of this Masoretic tradition at various periods, many of them presenting hitherto unstudied primary sources.
In this monograph, Roberta Morano re-examines one of the foundational works of the Omani Arabic dialectology field, Carl Reinhardtâs Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in âOman und Zanzibar (1894). This German-authored work was prolific in shaping our knowledge of Omani Arabic during the twentieth century, until the 1980s when more recent linguistic studies on the Arabic varieties spoken in Oman began to appear.
This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (âSyriacâ) Christians, Kurdish Muslims andâto a lesser extentâAramaic-speaking Jews.
This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (âSyriacâ) Christians, Kurdish Muslims andâto a lesser extentâAramaic-speaking Jews.
This book investigates the theories behind Semitic vocalisation and vowel phonology in the early medieval Middle East, tracing their evolution to identify points of intellectual contact between Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew linguists before the twelfth century.
This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way.
This volume contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.
The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.
Simplified Signs presents a system of manual sign communication intended for special populations who have had limited success mastering spoken or full sign languages. It is the culmination of over twenty years of research and development by the authors. The Simplified Sign System has been developed and tested for ease of sign comprehension, memorization, and formation by limiting the complexity of the motor skills required to form each sign, and by ensuring that each sign visually resembles the meaning it conveys. Lucid and comprehensive, this work constitutes a valuable resource that will enhance the communicative interactions of many different people, and will be of great interest to researchers and educators alike.
Simplified Signs presents a system of manual sign communication intended for special populations who have had limited success mastering spoken or full sign languages. It is the culmination of over twenty years of research and development by the authors. The Simplified Sign System has been developed and tested for ease of sign comprehension, memorization, and formation by limiting the complexity of the motor skills required to form each sign, and by ensuring that each sign visually resembles the meaning it conveys. Lucid and comprehensive, this work constitutes a valuable resource that will enhance the communicative interactions of many different people, and will be of great interest to researchers and educators alike.
'A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law' is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of medieval Scandinavia. This polyglot dictionary draws on the vast and vibrant range of vernacular legal terminology found in medieval Scandinavian texts â terminology which yields valuable insights into the quotidian realities of crime and retribution; the processes, application and execution of laws; and the cultural and societal concerns underlying the development and promulgation of such laws.
This volume brings together papers relating to the pronunciation of Semitic languages and the representation of their pronunciation in written form. The papers focus on sources representative of a period that stretches from late antiquity until the Middle Ages. A large proportion of them concern reading traditions of Biblical Hebrew, especially the vocalisation notation systems used to represent them. Also discussed are orthography and the written representation of prosody.
Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto is a welcome contribution to the field of modern languages, highlighting the intricate relationship between multilingualism and creativity, and, crucially, reaching beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. Intended to spark further research and discussion, this book appeals to young people interested in languages, language learning and cultural exchange. It will be a valuable resource for academics, educators, policy makers and parents of bilingual or multilingual children.
This volume presents a collection of articles centring on the language of the Mishnah and the Talmud â the most important Jewish texts (after the Bible), which were compiled in Palestine and Babylonia in the latter centuries of Late Antiquity. Despite the fact that Rabbinic Hebrew has been the subject of growing academic interest across the past century, very little scholarship has been written on it in English.
This book presents the current state of knowledge of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew and a full edition of one of the key medieval sources, HidÄyat al-QÄriÊŸ âThe Guide for the Readerâ, by ÊŸAbĆ« al-Faraj HÄrĆ«n. There is also an accompanying oral performance of samples of the reconstructed pronunciation by Alex Foreman.
This book presents the current state of knowledge of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew and a full edition of one of the key medieval sources, HidÄyat al-QÄriÊŸ âThe Guide for the Readerâ, by ÊŸAbĆ« al-Faraj HÄrĆ«n. There is also an accompanying oral performance of samples of the reconstructed pronunciation by Alex Foreman.
This highly original and timely collection brings together case studies from salient areas of the Himalayan region to explore the politics of language contact. Promoting a linguistically and historically grounded perspective, The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya offers nuanced insights into language and its relation to power in this geopolitically complex region.
This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. Itâs a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training.
This book combines a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of its comparative and historical background. Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finneganâs fascinating study sets our present conventions in cross-cultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. By tracking the changing definitions and control of quoting over the millennia, Finnegan sheds new light on ideas such as âimitationâ, âallusionâ, âauthorshipâ, âoriginalityâ and âplagiarismâ.