Linguistics (31)

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

A Grammar of the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Gabes

• Wiktor Gębski

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.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• History
• Linguistics

The Kingdom and the Qur’an: Translating the Holy Book of Islam in Saudi Arabia

• Mykhaylo Yakubovych

This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an 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.

• Digital Humanities
• Information Technology and Computer Science
• Linguistics

Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice

• Arianna Ciula
• Øyvind Eide
• Cristina Marras
• Patrick Sahle

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?

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

The Standard Language Ideology of the Hebrew and Arabic Grammarians of the ʿAbbasid Period

• Benjamin Paul Kantor

In the present book we survey six specific characteristics of a ‘standard language ideology’ that appear in both the writings of the Hebrew grammarians who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and the Arabic grammarians during the ʿAbbasid 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.

• Economics, Politics and Sociology
• Linguistics

Misunderstandings: False Beliefs in Communication

• Georg Weizsäcker

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.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Asian Studies
• Folklore and Ethnology
• Linguistics
• Literature

Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné

• Bendi Tso
• Marnyi Gyatso
• Naljor Tsering
• Mark Turin
• Members of the Choné Tibetan Community

This book contains a unique collection of Tibetan oral narrations and songs known as Shépa, as these have been performed, recorded and shared between generations of Choné Tibetans from Amdo living in the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Presented in trilingual format — in Tibetan, Chinese and English — the book reflects a sustained collaboration with and between members of the local community, including narrators, monks, and scholars, calling attention to the diversity inherent in all oral traditions, and the mutability of Shépa in particular.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text

• William A. Ross
• Elizabeth Robar

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

The Linguistic Classification of the Reading Traditions of Biblical Hebrew: A Phyla-and-Waves Model

• Benjamin Paul Kantor

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

An Introduction to Andalusi Hebrew Metrics

• José Martínez Delgado

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics
• Literature

The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew

• Aaron D. Hornkohl

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 tradition’s 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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

The Bible in the Bowls: A Catalogue of Biblical Quotations in Published Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic Bowls

• Daniel James Waller

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible

• Daniel J. Crowther
• Aaron D. Hornkohl
• Geoffrey Khan

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 ‘Masoretic Tradition’. 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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics
• Literature

Diachronic Variation in the Omani Arabic Vernacular of the Al-ʿAwābī District: From Carl Reinhardt (1894) to the Present Day

• Roberta Morano

In this monograph, Roberta Morano re-examines one of the foundational works of the Omani Arabic dialectology field, Carl Reinhardt’s Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in ‘Oman 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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Folklore and Ethnology
• Linguistics
• Literature

Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts, Volume 1

• Geoffrey Khan
• Masoud Mohammadirad
• Dorota Molin
• Paul M. Noorlander

This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Folklore and Ethnology
• Linguistics
• Literature

Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts, Volume 2

• Geoffrey Khan
• Masoud Mohammadirad
• Dorota Molin
• Paul M. Noorlander

This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Folklore and Ethnology
• Linguistics

The Neo-Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho

• Oz Aloni

Aloni focuses on three genres of the Zakho community’s oral heritage: the proverb, the enriched biblical narrative and the folktale.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew

• Nick Posegay

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic

• Esther-Miriam Wagner

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew

• Aaron D. Hornkohl
• Geoffrey Khan

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic

• Geoffrey Khan
• Paul M. Noorlander

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.

• Education
• Linguistics

Simplified Signs: A Manual Sign-Communication System for Special Populations, Volume 1.

• John D. Bonvillian
• Nicole Kissane Lee
• Tracy T. Dooley
• Filip T. Loncke

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.

• Education
• Linguistics

Simplified Signs: A Manual Sign-Communication System for Special Populations, Volume 2.

• John D. Bonvillian
• Nicole Kissane Lee
• Tracy T. Dooley
• Filip T. Loncke

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.

• Law
• Linguistics
• Reference Books

A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law

• Jeffrey Love
• Inger Larsson
• Ulrika Djärv
• Christine Peel
• Erik Simensen

'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 – 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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

Studies in Semitic Vocalisation and Reading Traditions

• Aaron D. Hornkohl
• Geoffrey Khan

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.

• Education
• Linguistics

Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto

• Katrin Kohl
• Rajinder Dudrah
• Andrew Gosler
• Suzanne Graham
• Martin Maiden
• Wen-chin Ouyang

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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

Studies in Rabbinic Hebrew

• Shai Heijmans

This volume presents a collection of articles centring on the language of the Mishnah and the Talmud – 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.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1

• Geoffrey Khan

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, Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ ‘The Guide for the Reader’, by ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn. There is also an accompanying oral performance of samples of the reconstructed pronunciation by Alex Foreman.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Linguistics

The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 2

• Geoffrey Khan

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, Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ ‘The Guide for the Reader’, by ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn. There is also an accompanying oral performance of samples of the reconstructed pronunciation by Alex Foreman.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Linguistics

The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya

• Selma K. Sonntag
• Mark Turin

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.

• Linguistics
• Reference Books

Dictionary of the British English Spelling System

• Greg Brooks

This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It’s 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.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Linguistics

Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation

• Ruth Finnegan

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 Finnegan’s 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 ‘imitation’, ‘allusion’, ‘authorship’, ‘originality’ and ‘plagiarism’.