William McGrath

University of Toronto, Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, Graduate Student

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For a general background please see below. However a small update: I have started a one year study trip in Jena, Germany and will develop my Sumerian under Dr. Krebernik and Dr. Lämmerhirt. I will return to Toronto for the 2015/2016 year and complete a third year of MA studies at that point.

Background:

After completing my studies as an undergraduate student at the Near and Middle East Civilizations department of the University of Toronto, I have now started a [three] year MA program at the same department. I have an inordinately great amount of respect and gratitude toward NMC for enabling me to turn what had been a long period of independent research into an academically measurable progress. Best wishes to all at NMC and the field of ANE studies as a whole.

Please feel welcomed and encouraged to discuss any enthusiasm for Sumerian and Mesopotamian culture and the field that supports this at my long standing internet discussion group -open to anyone!- enenuru:

http://enenuru.proboards.com/index.cgi?
Supervisors: Paul Alain-Beaulieu

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Eric Schmidtchen

University of Vienna

John Z Wee

National University of Singapore

Eckart Frahm

Yale University

Troels Pank Arbøll

University of Copenhagen

Matthew Rutz

Brown University

Strahil Panayotov

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

GEMH Groupe d'Etude des Mondes Hellénistiques

Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne

Eleanor Robson

University College London

Philippe Clancier

Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne

Biljana Stankovic

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Papers by William McGrath

The Diagnostic Series SA.GIG

The following thesis study will explore and contextualize the tradition of Mesopotamian medical d... more The following thesis study will explore and contextualize the tradition of Mesopotamian medical diagnostics for the reader, with a particular focus on the first millennium canonical series SA.GIG. It charts the rise of the ancient diagnostician, the āšipu, as well as the emergence of the early diagnostic texts which predate the SA.GIG series. It problematizes the role of the series’ (alleged) 11th century editor, Esagil-kīn-apli, and seeks to qualify his role by delineating between editorial innovations and editorial adaptations. With reference to recent in-depth structural studies of the texts, it will argue that the head-to-foot order of the second subseries is an adaptation while the real innovation lies in the grouping of the entries within that order. This thesis will also argue for the association of the diagnostic and divinatory traditions based on an examination of the structure of the diagnoses and the modus operandi of the diagnostician.

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It is the Incantation of Ningirima: Theistic Force in the Early Mesopotamian Magical Tradition

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Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters by William McGrath

Annotating a Low-Resource Language with LLOD Technology: Sumerian Morphology and Syntax

by Ilya Khait, Émilie Pagé-Perron, William McGrath, and Jinyan Wang

This paper describes work on the morphological and syntactic annotation of Sumerian cuneiform as ... more This paper describes work on the morphological and syntactic annotation of Sumerian cuneiform as a model for low resource languages in general. Cuneiform texts are invaluable sources for the study of history, languages, economy, and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions. Assyriology, the discipline dedicated to their study, has vast research potential, but lacks the modern means for computational processing and analysis. Our project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages, aims to fill this gap by bringing together corpus data, lexical data, linguistic annotations and object metadata. The project's main goal is to build a pipeline for machine translation and annotation of Sumerian Ur III administrative texts. The rich and structured data is then to be made accessible in the form of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data (LLOD), which should open them to a larger research community. Our contribution is twofold: in terms of language technology, our work represents the first attempt to develop an integrative infrastructure for the annotation of morphology and syntax on the basis of RDF technologies and LLOD resources. With respect to Assyriology, we work towards producing the first syntactically annotated corpus of Sumerian.

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The Diagnostic Series SA.GIG

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It is the Incantation of Ningirima: Theistic Force in the Early Mesopotamian Magical Tradition

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Annotating a Low-Resource Language with LLOD Technology: Sumerian Morphology and Syntax

by Ilya Khait, Émilie Pagé-Perron, William McGrath, and Jinyan Wang

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William McGrath

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Papers by William McGrath

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters by William McGrath

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