Semitic studies

The article analyzes the verbal system in the Hebrew language of Yehuda Ha-Lewi, which is (and was) represented solely by poetry. It points at Ha-Lewi's poetics, as the central factor shaping his language, whose verbal forms were ascribed additional poetic functions. It aims to define grammatical units and rhetorical techniques which, combined, were used by Ha-Lewi to create his unique poetic style and linguistic system coherent, though seemingly mimicking Biblical Hebrew. Due to the uniqueness of the corpus of the language and the fact that the rhetorical functions were to a large extent ascribed to grammatical forms, in order to define them most accurately, I apply the discursive-pragmatic approach. This method has allowed to outline the matrix of Ha-Lewi's verbal system and define its innovative features.

Arabic has been spoken as a mother tongue in Iran since pre-Islamic times, but a number of the Arabic dialect groups scattered across the country have not been documented. In this study, we provide a first account of Arabic on Iran's southern coast, with a description of the dialect of Bandar Moqām in western Hormozgan Province. Using the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) linguistic data questionnaire as well as supplementary elicitation and oral texts, we have documented salient elements of its lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax. Our analysis confirms that Bandar Moqām Arabic fits into the wider Gulf Arabic dialect area, yet is internally heterogenous. On the one hand, it shares many features with the regionally dominant 'Bedouin' type Gulf Arabic koine, but it also aligns with distinctive structuresboth retentions and innovations-in the more ancient 'Sedentary' Gulf dialects that originated in southern Arabia. Further, it exhibits a series of structures in common with Mesopotamian Arabic and its descendants that reached as far as Central Asia during the Arab conquest of greater Persia and are still spoken there today.

Abū al-Mūnā Dawūd ibn Abī Naṡr al-Kūhīn al-ʿAṫṫār, Minhāj al-dukkān (How to Run a Pharmacy). See ed. al-ʿĀṡī (1997). 6 See ed. Marín and Waines (1993) and trans. Nasrallah (2018). All English versions of recipes from Kanz al-fawāʾid fī tanwīʿ al-mawāʾid (Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table) in this chapter are adapted from Nawal Nasrallah's amazing translation. 7 Nasrallah (2007: 65).

In 1898, the Orientalistische Literaturzeitung (OLZ) appeared for the first time, as a review journal comprising Oriental Studies  in their entirety, against the backdrop of the establishment of learned societies  and the beginnings of German excavations in Babylon.  Until today the journal has maintained the self-same holistic approach, constituting the oldest review journal for Orientalist Studies: Egyptology; Assyriology and Near Eastern Archaeology; the Old Testament, Semitic, Islamic, Iranian, and Judaic Studies; South, Central and East Asian Studies; and African Studies as well.
Throughout the vicissitudes of German history, OLZ asserted its status as an internationally recognized academic journal providing documentation for the disciplinary history of Oriental Studies and the interdependencies between research and Weltanschauung (ideology). Ever since Edward W. Said’s  influential – if highly controversial – study of ‘Orientalism’ and within the context of contemporaneous postcolonial debates, Oriental Studies face various challenges, and the necessity to re-negotiate (continuously) their relationship as an academic discipline with the public.
The conference aims to further that process, highlighting the background of and conditions for the development of Oriental disciplines, the role played by academic journals – especially those involved with reviews – and to analyse communication and content of research in various disciplines, against the background of societal and political developments in Germany.

Machine learning (ML) systems often encounter Out-of-Distribution (OoD) errors when dealing with testing data coming from a distribution different from training data. It becomes important for ML systems in critical applications to accurately quantify its predictive uncertainty and screen out these anomalous inputs. However, existing OoD detection approaches are prone to errors and even sometimes assign higher likelihoods to OoD samples. Unlike standard learning tasks, there is currently no well established guiding principle for designing OoD detection architectures that can accurately quantify uncertainty. To address these problems, we first seek to identify guiding principles for designing uncertaintyaware architectures, by proposing Neural Architecture Distribution Search (NADS). NADS searches for a distribution of architectures that perform well on a given task, allowing us to identify common building blocks among all uncertainty-aware architectures. With this formulation, we are able to optimize a stochastic OoD detection objective and construct an ensemble of models to perform OoD detection. We perform multiple OoD detection experiments and observe that our NADS performs favorably, with up to 57% improvement in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods among 15 different testing configurations.

Maledicta (insults) occur in Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) letters, literary text genres, royal inscriptions and lexical texts. A semantic typology of Akkadian maledicta distinguishes the following groups: animals, sexual and scatological maledicta; maledicta referring to dirt, physical or mental handicaps, to an unknown or bad origin, to the abandonment by god; maledicta designating a person as deceiver, denunciator, chatterer, criminal or evildoer. Maledicta are a source for the Mesopotamian canon of values.

Lemmata-unicode CDA Archive-Unicode Version q Back to CDA home page q Contributors If your browser can read unicode, the following characters will be displayed correctly: a macrone macroni macronu macronhet-h shin-š s.adi-• t.et-• List of roots p. xvii blky corrected to blkt in 2nd impression. p. xix add hms see hummusum p. xx add mšt see maš tu abku(m) II for OB see Durand, ARM 26/i, p. 351 note g) ad no. 171.rev.10'. abal see a-bal qib tišu •irtu 'without his elevated decree' Nabonidus (Harran), Gadd, Anatolian Studies 8 (1958) p. 62 ii.36; cf. Moran, Or. NS 28 (1959) 139. abašmû for f. abašm tu 'of Kaniš' see CT 44 23:11 (not lex.!; cited MSL 10, p. 21 ad. l. 175). abtu(m) II G for OB see George, NABU 1991 p. 16 no. 19.1 ad Gilg. Y.iv.18 Ih-bu-tu. abbšu Freydank, WVDOG 92, no. 5.40'; see Postgate, Studies Veenhof, p. 375 for another attestation and possibility that the word refers to a textile worker. [abbu] AHw meaning 2 suppressed. In KAV 99:22 read •i-ir-pa na !-ab-bi-ša (see Freydank/Saporetti, B bu-aha-iddina. Die Texte, p. 61).

Reference:
Olivieri, Simona. 2024. “Integrating Digital Humanities Courses into University-Level Language Studies Curriculum.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 18 (1): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2024.0318.

Abstract:
This article presents the courses on digital humanities (DH) offered by the Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik at Freie Universität Berlin in three semesters in the period 2021–2023. The article provides an overview of the organizational background, the rationale for the selected teaching format, and the syllabus developed. In the discussion section, we present our observations based on the teaching activities and feedback from the course participants. The article aims to discuss methods of teaching DH at the university level as well as to document a teaching format that links together teaching, training and research.

Background Improving infant immunization completion and promoting equitable vaccination coverage are crucial to reducing global under-5 childhood mortality. Although there have been hypotheses that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic would decrease the delivery of health services and immunization campaigns in low-and middleincome countries, the available evidence is still inconclusive. We conducted a study in rural Burkina Faso to assess changes in vaccination coverage during the pandemic. A secondary objective was to examine long-term trends in vaccination coverage throughout 2010-2021. Methods Using a quasi-experimental approach, we conducted three rounds of surveys (2019, 2020, 2021) in rural Burkina Faso that we pooled with two previous rounds of demographic and household surveys (2010, 2015) to assess trends in vaccination coverage. The study population comprised infants aged 0-13 months from a sample of 325 households randomly selected in eight districts (n = 736). We assessed vaccination coverage by directly observing the infants' vaccination booklet. Effects of the pandemic on infant vaccination completion were analyzed using multi-level logistic regression models with random intercepts at the household and district levels.

Background: In November 2011, Malawi introduced the 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) into the routine infant schedule. Four to 7 years after introduction (2015-2018), rolling prospective nasopharyngeal carriage surveys were performed in the city of Blantyre. Carriage of Streptococcus pneumoniae vaccine serotypes (VT) remained higher than reported in high-income countries, and impact was asymmetric across age groups. Methods: A dynamic transmission model was fit to survey data using a Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo approach, to obtain insights into the determinants of post-PCV13 age-specific VT carriage. Results: Accumulation of naturally acquired immunity with age and age-specific transmission potential were both key to reproducing the observed data. VT carriage reduction peaked sequentially over time, earlier in younger and later in older age groups. Estimated vaccine efficacy (protection against carriage) was 66.87% (95% CI 50.49-82.26%), similar to previous estimates. Ten-year projected vaccine impact (VT carriage reduction) among 0-9 years old was lower than observed in other settings, at 76.23% (CI 95% 68.02-81.96%), with sensitivity analyses demonstrating this to be mainly driven by a high local force of infection. Conclusions: There are both vaccine-related and host-related determinants of post-PCV13 pneumococcal VT transmission in Blantyre with vaccine impact determined by an age-specific, local force of infection. These findings are likely to be generalisable to other Sub-Saharan African countries in which PCV impact on carriage (and therefore herd protection) has been lower than desired, and have implications for the interpretation of post-PCV carriage studies and future vaccination programs.

This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and denoting two different notions of linguistic salience: keyness and prosodic prominence. Our novel hypothesis investigates a possible correlation between them. Our novel findings discover distributionally significant keywords that also occur strategically in phrase-final position so as to maximise their prominence, and thus meaningfulness, for reader, reciter, and aural recipient. Our methodology first computes Quranic keywords via the Corpus Linguistics technique of Keyword Extraction, and maps them to major Quranic themes in Islamic scholarship. Next, we implement a bespoke algorithm for rule-based capture of words annotated with madd or prolongation, a specific type of prosodic highlighting in Quranic recitation rules or tajwīd. We find it especially interesting that the concept of final syllable lengthening (madd before pause) is encoded in tajwīid and effectively demarcates phrase b...

Semi-supervised deep learning (SSDL) is a popular strategy to leverage unlabelled data for machine learning when labelled data is not readily available. In real-world scenarios, different unlabelled data sources are usually available, with varying degrees of distribution mismatch regarding the labelled datasets. It begs the question which unlabelled dataset to choose for good SSDL outcomes. Oftentimes, semantic heuristics are used to match unlabelled data with labelled data. However, a quantitative and systematic approach to this selection problem would be preferable. In this work, we first test the SSDL MixMatch algorithm under various distribution mismatch configurations to study the impact on SSDL accuracy. Then, we propose a quantitative unlabelled dataset selection heuristic based on dataset dissimilarity measures. These are designed to systematically assess how distribution mismatch between the labelled and unlabelled datasets affects MixMatch performance. We refer to our proposed method as deep dataset dissimilarity measures (DeDiMs), designed to compare labelled and unlabelled datasets. They use the feature space of a generic Wide-ResNet, can be applied prior to learning, are quick to evaluate and model agnostic. The strong correlation in our tests between MixMatch accuracy and the proposed DeDiMs suggests that this approach can be a good fit for quantitatively ranking different unlabelled datasets prior to SSDL training. Impact Statement-Semi-supervised deep learning is a technique for training a deep learning model when few labelled observations are available, leveraging unlabelled datasets. Different unlabelled data sources may be available, introducing the possibility for distribution mismatches between the labelled and unlabelled datasets. In this work we assess the impact of distribution mismatches on the outcomes of the semi-supervised MixMatch algorithm. We propose a set of simple feature-space density dataset distances, referred to as deep dataset dissimilarity measures (DeDiMs). In our extensive test-bed, the evaluated DeDiMs yield

Medical prescriptions in the Cambridge Genizah collections : practical medicine and pharmacology in medieval Egypt / by Efraim Lev, Leigh Chipman. p. ; cm.-(Etudes sur le judaïsme médiéval, ISSN 0169-815X ; t. 55) (Cambridge Genizah studies series ; v. 4) Companion to: Practical materia medica of the medieval eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah / Efraim Lev and Zohar Amar. 2008. Includes bibliographical references and index.

The advanced development of computing technology covers various religious texts, such as Quran. Through computing technology, the Quran is formatted digitally in the forms of images and texts. The Quranic format in the form of digital texts, furthermore, is transformed into a Quranic corpus used widely as the material and object of Quranic studies in various fields by using the corpus linguistic approach. Although Quranic corpora are extensively available and widely used, introduction to corpora and its extensive use need to be done in Indonesia. This article will descriptively discuss various Quranic corpus models that can be utilized for the interest of corpus-based research about the Al-Quran. This study found that there are several models and formats of monolingual Quranic corpora that can be processed using certain applications. However, bilingual or even multilingual content of Quranic corpora in a parallel corpus format have not found yet specifically. This study concludes that on one hand the existing monolingual Quranic corpora have already been adequate to be applied in the Quranic corpus studies. However, on the other hand, the absence of parallel Quranic corpus models gives an opportunity for the research and trials in preparing the corpus so that it can be applied to develop Quranic corpus studies.

The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in parts of the Gulf and East Africa. The estimated number of Mehri speakers is between 100,000–180,000. Following Hall (2006), this study distinguishes between two types of inserted vowels: epenthetic vowels, which repair illicit syllable structures, and intrusive vowels, which transition between consonants. The paper examines how the properties of epenthetic and intrusive vowels as proposed by Hall relate to Mehri.

This study is an extended review article of Donner's Narratives of Islamic Origins. It will be composed of three sections: 1) a critical survey of the contents of the book, 2) some reservations with regard to a number of the topics Donner raises, and 3) comments and corrections.

Nationwide case-based meningitis surveillance was established in Burkina Faso following the introduction of meningococcal serogroup A conjugate vaccine in 2010. However, timely tracking and arrival of cerebrospinal fluid specimens for confirmation at national reference laboratories remained suboptimal. To better understand this gap and identify bottlenecks, the Burkina Faso Ministry of Health, along with key partners, developed and implemented a cloud-based System for Tracking Epidemiological Data and Laboratory Specimens (STELAB), allowing for timely nationwide data reporting and specimen tracking using barcodes. STELAB was adapted to Burkina Faso’s infrastructure to ensure suitability, functionality, flexibility, and sustainability. We describe the design, development, and implementation of STELAB. In addition, we discuss strategies used to promote sustainability, lessons learned during the first year of implementation, and future directions. STELAB’s novel design and country-driv...

Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, tenth century) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew-called the Maḥberet-on Spanish soil. His role in the development of Hebrew grammar, however, has not been given pride of place in the scholarly literature. Renewed interest in his theory arose only in the late twentieth century. As some scholars have noted, Menaḥem was the first to reveal the three-consonantal basis of Hebrew roots. This article will continue to establish the basis for this concept, while further elaborating on several emphases in his teaching, especially in the context of the distinction between the radical and the servile letters and their subdivision, which, in our view, led Menaḥem to formulate his root concept. Following our analysis, we note a difference between the 'lexical root' concept, by which he arranged the entries in his Maḥberet, and the 'substantive root' concept on which he based his innovation. A parallel idea can be seen in the theory of Yūsuf Ibn Nūḥ, who set forth the jawhar concept, which means the basic entity of a word on the abstract level (as opposed to a word-based morphology), as Geoffrey Khan has shown. The article concludes with a clarification of the difference between Menaḥem's theory and that of Judah Ḥayyūj. Despite the enormous development made by Menaḥem, he was not able to offer a coherent morphological system, as Ḥayyūj did. Preface Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, 920-70) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew-called the Maḥberet-on Spanish soil. The noted scholar Wilhelm Bacher maintained that he had gone to great lengths to create Hebrew terminology, and that he was the first scholar who attempted to arrange the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible based on its roots, in a coherent and accurate

* zegiy lr wi'v'v cec dynl ,xn`nd zaizk jldna icia eriiqy ixagl al axwn dcez ,ald znkge dxfr lr bxapfii`lfxn dxnzl ,dnewna xkfizy dxfr lr aixi dix`l ,zenikgn .l`wfgile ,l"nw ycewd oeyl ,oeyld lr odk miigl ,oeirxe dgiy ,d`ixw lr xhky ccerl 1 yecig`iand ,cxetqwe`zhiqxaipe`n bxapiiee dp`e'b ly dxn`n !ycg df d`x z`f lkae e`x l"xdn ixtq zqtcd lr .xtqd`eana dxvwa x`eznde ,l"xdn iiga ietv izlae oprxn .df jxka aelcei wgvi ly exn`n zencw`:l"xdn drtyd ß dpyn ß miig iwxt jxer xpiix opglì cedid mrd zeclez xwgl xfy onlf fkxn milyexi MAHARAL Overtures

The learned weights of a neural network are often considered devoid of scrutable internal structure. To discern structure in these weights, we introduce a measurable notion of modularity for multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and investigate the modular structure of MLPs trained on datasets of small images. Our notion of modularity comes from the graph clustering literature: a "module" is a set of neurons with strong internal connectivity but weak external connectivity. We find that training and weight pruning produces MLPs that are more modular than randomly initialized ones, and often significantly more modular than random MLPs with the same (sparse) distribution of weights. Interestingly, they are much more modular when trained with dropout. We also present exploratory analyses of the importance of different modules for performance and how modules depend on each other. Understanding the modular structure of neural networks, when such structure exists, will hopefully render their inner workings more interpretable to engineers. 1 Note that this paper has been superceded by "Clusterability in Neural Networks", arXiv:2103.03386 and "Quantifying Local Specialization in Deep Neural Networks", arXiv:2110.08058! * Equal contributions, order determined randomly.

The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in parts of the Gulf and East Africa. The estimated number of Mehri speakers is between 100,000–180,000. Following Hall (2006), this study distinguishes between two types of inserted vowels: epenthetic vowels, which repair illicit syllable structures, and intrusive vowels, which transition between consonants. The paper examines how the properties of epenthetic and intrusive vowels as proposed by Hall relate to Mehri.

Objective The Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC) and other PCORnet Clinical Data Research Networks capture healthcare utilization within their health systems. Here, we describe a reusable environment (GPC Reusable Observable Unified Study Environment [GROUSE]) that integrates hospital and electronic health records (EHRs) data with state-wide Medicare and Medicaid claims and assess how claims and clinical data complement each other to identify obesity and related comorbidities in a patient sample. Materials and Methods EHR, billing, and tumor registry data from 7 healthcare systems were integrated with Center for Medicare (2011–2016) and Medicaid (2011–2012) services insurance claims to create deidentified databases in Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside and PCORnet Common Data Model formats. We describe technical details of how this federally compliant, cloud-based data environment was built. As a use case, trends in obesity rates for different age groups are reported,...

The epigraphic, linguistic, and historical studies of M.C.A. Macdonald are well-known to all students of pre-Islamic Arabia and the Hellenistic and Roman Levant. His erudition is appreciated by all who know him and his careful work is testament to a style of scholarship, which should be a model for all of us, wherever we may be in our careers. The present volume is even more of a bonanza than most Variorum reprints in that Macdonald has given us fully 23 pages of addenda and corrigenda (conveniently indicated in the original texts through an asterisk adjacent to the line on which an addendum or corrigendum has been provided), 36 pages of invaluable index, and English translations of two papers published originally in French and Italian. Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia includes nine articles grouped under three topic headings as follows: Part I. Literacy, languages and scripts-'Literacy in an oral environment'; 'Nomads and the 'the Hawràn' in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods: A reassessment of the epigraphic evidence'; 'Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia'; Part II. Ancient ethnicity-'Some reflections on epigraphy and ethnicity in the Roman Near East'; 'Arabians, Arabias, and the Greeks: Contact and perceptions' (orig. Italian); 'Les Arabes en Syrie' or 'La pénétration des Arabes en Syrie': A question of perceptions?'; and Part III. Aspects of the history of ancient Arabia-'Was the Nabataean kingdom a "Bedouin state"?'; 'On Saracens, the Rawwàfah inscription and the Roman army' (orig. French); and 'Trade and trade goods at the northern end of the "incense road" in the first millennium B.C. Macdonald describes his own oeuvre as being 'concerned with the many and varied uses of writing in the ancient Near East, and with the ways personal and communal identities were expressed and perceived in that region, particularly in pre-Islamic Arabia' (p. vii). This, however, is a somewhat minimalist view of a career which has involved extensive epigraphic survey in Jordan and Syria; numerous publications of previously unknown or misunderstood inscriptions (particularly Safaitic); and wide-ranging historical analyses that touch on all parts of the Arabian peninsula and the North Arabian desert zone across all known pre-Islamic Arabian dialects. At the same time, Macdonald's comparative perspective, nowhere better illustrated than in his magisterial chapter on 'Literacy in an

Asymptotic behavior of three-dimensional mixed, periodic and rotating magnetohydrodynamic system is investigated as the Rossby number goes to zero. The system presents the difficulty to be singular and mixed, that is hyperbolic in the vertical direction and parabolic in the horizontal one. The divergence free condition and the spectral properties of the penalization operator are crucial in the proofs. The main tools are the energy method, the Schochet's method and products laws in anisotropic Sobolev spaces.

Arabic has been spoken as a mother tongue in Iran since pre-Islamic times, but a number of the Arabic dialect groups scattered across the country have not been documented. In this study, we provide a first account of Arabic on Iran's southern coast, with a description of the dialect of Bandar Moqām in western Hormozgan Province. Using the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) linguistic data questionnaire as well as supplementary elicitation and oral texts, we have documented salient elements of its lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax. Our analysis confirms that Bandar Moqām Arabic fits into the wider Gulf Arabic dialect area, yet is internally heterogenous. On the one hand, it shares many features with the regionally dominant 'Bedouin' type Gulf Arabic koine, but it also aligns with distinctive structuresboth retentions and innovations-in the more ancient 'Sedentary' Gulf dialects that originated in southern Arabia. Further, it exhibits a series of structures in common with Mesopotamian Arabic and its descendants that reached as far as Central Asia during the Arab conquest of greater Persia and are still spoken there today.

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Introduction: Trust in nursing care has profound effects on parents of hospitalized children, their child, and subsequent hospital admissions. The creation and maintenance of trust is essential to increasing the benefits of the relationship between nurses and parents of hospitalized children. Therefore, this study was conducted to explore experiences of parents of hospitalized children regarding trust barriers to nursing care. Method: This qualitative study was conducted in 2012-2013 using content analysis. The Study population consisted of 18 parents of children admitted to pediatric hospitals in Yazd, Iran. The subjects were selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected through targeted in-depth semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results: Data analysis led to the emergence of the main category of unsafe care the sub-classes of which included low caring sensitivity, lack of competence, stressful communication, and lack of interest in the profession and patients. Conclusion: Nursing managers can facilitate the evolution of trust in nursing care among parents by taking measures to improve the professional performance of nurses, educate nurses about issues such as how to communicate with parents and children, and updat professional knowledge.

This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babylonian letter OIP 114, 17:8, 29, thereby clarifying its contents. The word in question is shown to be an Aramaic verb form. This interpretation is supported by observations on the orthography and phonology of early Neo-Babylonian. It follows from the study that in eighth-century Neo-Babylonian two glottalized (‘emphatic’) consonants in the same word still underwent dissimilation, as in the second millennium bce (Geers’ law). The paper also demonstrates that, against communis opinio, erstwhile Aramaic fricative interdentals had shifted to stops by the eighth century bce, while the orthography of contemporaneous Aramaic alphabetic texts reflected an earlier stage of language evolution. This conclusion has been reached by means of comparing cuneiform renderings of proto-Semitic interdentals in West Semitic personal names in eighteenth-century bce Old Babylonian texts and in Neo-Babylonian texts...

Political Fictions, Political Realities Aksumite-Ḥimyarite Relations in the Fourth Century CE Beginning in the fourth century CE, rulers of the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum laid claim to neighboring South Arabia in their royal titles. The problem for historians is that, although the Aksumites are indeed known to have occupied parts of South Arabia during the third century, and to have conquered the region outright in the early sixth century, hard evidence of Aksumite rule during the intervening period is lacking. This being the case, claims of rulership over South Arabia made by fourth-century Aksumite kings would appear to be a political fiction-the reflection, perhaps, of irredentist hopes. However, while irredentist ideology may well have played a role in shaping this political fiction, it fails to account for why such fictitious claims were first put forward when they were. This article makes the case that Gr 27, a Sabaic inscription dating from the early fourth century, provides an answer. The inscription documents the restoration of a structure destroyed by the Aksumites at Ẓafār, capital of the South Arabian kingdom of Ḥimyar. Since this destruction cannot be linked to Aksumite military ventures during the third century, Gr 27 would imply that Aksum invaded South Arabia during the early fourth century. It is here argued that, while this invasion failed to restore Aksumite suzerainty, it provided the pretext for claiming South Arabia as a vassal, a political fiction that Aksumite kings advertised back in Ethiopia.

This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics – whether within phonology (e.g. the levels of distinctive features, phonemics/phonematics, and phonotactics), grammar (e.g. morphology and syntax), or ‘abstract semantics’ – are unnecessary. Although such levels correspond to an intuitively plausible model of natural languages, even natural languages are not fully constructed in the way these levels suggest, while other semiotic systems may be organisationally extremely different from the situation implied by these levels. In order to provide elegant (simple) and intuitively reasonable accounts of the relevant facts of language linguistic theories need to be significantly modified. ‘Translating’ into the specific technical terms of extended axiomatic functionnalism, the theory which is the focus of this paper, this means that the levels of ontidics (cenidics/phonidics, logidics/lexidics, delidics), ontematics (cenematics/phonematics, logematics...

User activities generate a significant number of poor-quality or irrelevant images and data vectors that cannot be processed in the main data processing pipeline or included in the training dataset. Such samples can be found with manual analysis by an expert or with anomalous detection algorithms. There are several formal definitions for the anomaly samples. For neural networks, the anomalous is usually defined as out-of-distribution samples. This work proposes methods for supervised and semisupervised detection of out-of-distribution samples in image datasets. Our approach extends a typical neural network that solves the image classification problem. Thus, one neural network after extension can solve image classification and anomalous detection problems simultaneously. Proposed methods are based on the center loss and its effect on a deep feature distribution in a last hidden layer of the neural network. This paper provides an analysis of the proposed methods for the LeNet and EfficientNet-B0 on the MNIST and ImageNet-30 datasets.

Hebrew and Maltese are obliquely related members of the Semitic language family. Past comparative research inspired by Bible translation highlighted in atomistic fashion a number of common traits in these two languages. The present research probes aspects of selected phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical traits in Biblical and Israeli Hebrew from the comparative perspective of contemporary Maltese. Given the fact that the latter may well retain substratal elements inherited from Phoenician and Punic, the parallels tentatively indicated here, particularly in the lexical domain, may provide the basis for a reconstruction of the earliest diachronic stage of the Maltese word stock. If on the mark, it also seriously calls into question claims advanced in recent historical work on Maltese to the effect that the Arab invasion of the Maltese Islands in the 9th century entailed the complete annihilation of the indigenous population thereby breaking the continuity with the lingu...

Charles Darwin is believed to be the first proponent of the evolutionary theory. This paper theorizes another point of view in this regard. Many a Muslim philosopher had already discussed the concept of evolution in their writings prior to Darwin. The pre-Darwinian Muslim scholars provided sufficient materials to Darwin for his theory of evolution who gave it scientific language. John William Draper, a contemporary of Darwin, called it the "Mohammadan Theory of Evolution". Darwin himself knew Arabic and had the direct access to Arabic literature. He was initiated into Islamic Culture in the Faculty of Religion at the University of Cambridge. Thus, it can be said that he derived the raw material of his theory from oriental literature.

THE BIBLE TRANSLATOR {VOL. 56, NO.3 could not have been found for more than two passing mentions of George Campbell's 1400-page The Four Gospels (1789), one of the "Preliminary Dissertations" in which is probably the first thorough discussion of translation theory, at least in English, and has the advantage of being linked to the practice of Bible translation. Our minor criticisms of The Bible ill English are immeasurably outweighed by our appreciation for a book which will long remain a rich source of information and delight.

This study examines the morphological theory of Joseph (Yūsuf) Ibn Nūḥ, a tenth-century Hebraist with a non-triliteral theory of Hebrew. Ibn Nūḥ's approach is first outlined using the previously-developed framework for non-triliteral Hebrew verbal morphology. Ibn Nūḥ's morphological model is then explored and it is determined that Ibn Nūḥ has an Item-and-Process model of morphology. With that insight it is suggested that Ibn Nūḥ recognizes roots only 'abstractively', with word-forms being constructed from 'bases' rather than 'roots'. Example passages are presented to demonstrate the contrast between Ibn Nūḥ's and Dunash Ibn Labraṭ's respective models of morphology.

This study presents a new suggestion as to the fundamental disagreement between the morphological theories of Menaḥem b. Saruq and Dunash b. Labraṭ, two tenth-century Hebraists with non-triliteral perspectives of the Hebrew root. A framework detailing the possible analyses of Hebrew verbal morphology without a priori assuming the triliteral perspective is first developed. It is noted that the multiplicity of possible analyses in this framework parallels the 'Segmentation Problem' of Romance languages due to thematic vowels. Based on analysis of their treatises it is then argued that Menaḥem generally follows one identified method of analysis, and Dunash another. Finally it is suggested that these different methods of analysis are rooted in two different models of morphology, with Menaḥem holding a morpheme-based model and Dunash holding a word-based model. An English translation of a lengthy relevant section of the introduction to Menaḥem's treatise is given as an appendix.

This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babylonian letter OIP 114, 17:8, 29, thereby clarifying its contents. The word in question is shown to be an Aramaic verb form. This interpretation is supported by observations on the orthography and phonology of early Neo-Babylonian. It follows from the study that in eighth-century Neo-Babylonian two glottalized (‘emphatic’) consonants in the same word still underwent dissimilation, as in the second millennium bce (Geers’ law). The paper also demonstrates that, against communis opinio, erstwhile Aramaic fricative interdentals had shifted to stops by the eighth century bce, while the orthography of contemporaneous Aramaic alphabetic texts reflected an earlier stage of language evolution. This conclusion has been reached by means of comparing cuneiform renderings of proto-Semitic interdentals in West Semitic personal names in eighteenth-century bce Old Babylonian texts and in Neo-Babylonian texts...

This article analyzes a medieval text known as The Secrets of Hippocrates. 1 Neither secret (because of its wide circulation in manuscript and print) nor by Hippocrates, the work offered readers a means of offering a prognosis of impending death based on observable signs on the skin. Although the aphorisms that make up the text make little sense in a modern medical understanding, the Secrets of Hippocrates fits well within three medieval traditions: the tradition of secrets literature, the medieval medical tradition, and the tradition of medieval Christian views about the body. First, like other books of secrets, a genre to whose conventions the text closely adheres, the Secrets of Hippocrates offered a shortcut to socially useful knowledge: the ability to offer an accurate medical prognosis. Second, the treatise corresponded to the medieval physician's concern for the so-called nonnaturals, such as diet and exercise. Third, it fit with a medieval Christian notion that sickness and sin were related, as were sin and ugliness. Just as a leper's deformities were a window to his sinful soul, so skin pathologies could clue a medieval physician to the lethal disease hidden inside the body.

 The topic of positive thinking in the recorded biography of the Prophet (s.a.w.) has not been investigated as much as it deserves, since the topic of positivity in general is hard to find. A quite few researches on positivity from Islamic approach have been done in the light of modern human knowledge. This research seeks to prove the assumption that the Prophet MuÍammad (s.a.w.) advanced a distinct multidimensional positive pattern, spiritual, emotional, moral and religious that reflected in his personality, his behavior and his teachings, by adopting an analytical methodology in tracing his sayings and deeds in old transcripts. This effort is aimed at filling the lacuna between Islamic heritage and contemporary researches, clarifying the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) positivity with his family, his companions and non-Muslims, and displaying the plethora of effects of his positivity on cross-religious, and psycho social settings.Keywords: Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.), Biography, Positivity, Mode...

This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and denoting two different notions of linguistic salience: keyness and prosodic prominence. Our novel hypothesis investigates a possible correlation between them. Our novel findings discover distributionally significant keywords that also occur strategically in phrase-final position so as to maximise their prominence, and thus meaningfulness, for reader, reciter, and aural recipient. Our methodology first computes Quranic keywords via the Corpus Linguistics technique of Keyword Extraction, and maps them to major Quranic themes in Islamic scholarship. Next, we implement a bespoke algorithm for rule-based capture of words annotated with madd or prolongation, a specific type of prosodic highlighting in Quranic recitation rules or tajwīd. We find it especially interesting that the concept of final syllable lengthening (madd before pause) is encoded in tajwīid and effectively demarcates phrase b...