Semitic studies

Meroitic language is one of the most controversial ancient languages but one of the few having advanced writing systems. Some classify it Asian, European, non-African, Semitic, or 'unclassified'. This paper contends Meroe, similar to their Cushitic friends, are left victims of preconceived ideas based on an entirely argument from silence, an hegemonic epistemology that elevates a single perspective and silences other(s). This paper, thus, comparatively analyzes Meroitic and Old Nubian lexical and grammatical items with corresponding Oromo, a Cushitic family which, many classical and contemporary philologists/linguists argue derives from a unique vocabulary possibly the Ancient language of the Nile Valley and/or Horn of Africa. Meroitic and Old Nubian lexical, grammatical and epigraphic data were collected from secondary sources by Meroitic researchers. Oromo corpora are obtained both from classical and modern descriptions and native-speakers. Results indicate Oromo lexemes show significant level of cognates with not only Meroitic and Old Nubian, but also with the Ancient Egyptian to their northern part.

A lot has been said and written about the so-called Ethiopic civilization said to have been built by unspecified white South Arabians into Black Africa, chiefly the Horn, in the 3 rd century Christian era. While such colonial mentality has gradually ebbed away in this (pot-)modern era, its vestige is yet thriving in Ethiosemitic circles. Scholars have hardly subjected this narrative to critical analysis. Only Ayele Bekerie has significantly destabilized this century-old phantasmagorical history. He explicated that it was but an hegemonic epistemology imposed upon African Ethiopians by few Indo-Semitic external paradigm that, in turn, continued to miseducate Abyssinian historians originating out of monastic education. Yet, Bekerie himself falls short of a paradigm-shifter role, since he, among other fallacies, could not make a break with the unexplained Ge'ez or Ethiopic speaking 'people'. This paper critically and multidisciplinarily analyzed both Bekerie's skeptic and Indo-Semitists' de-Africanizing discourses in the name of 'Ethiopic'. It showed that 'Ethiopic' was a colonial era conspiracy fabricated by means of dogmatic translation/transliteration and/or systematically distorted re-construction with the intention to misappropriate the autochthonous peoples' social epistemological texts, linguistic or non-linguistic, and ultimately left them physically, nationally and ideologically ever divided and 'historically' disoriented. This not only disrupted their civilization but also pulled them back to pre-classical times of 'nation-building'. This conspiracy is also partly responsible for unending tendencies of separationism, ethnocentrism, fundamentalism, and theocracticalautocratic-militarist totalitarian states and, consequently, unending and equal share of impecuniousness. This paper explicates how and why Ethiopic has neither been engineered by a social history of their own (Ethiosemites or Abyssinians) nor of by their South Arabic 'ancestors'. It also shades lights on how this miseducation is significant area of further critical inquiry for future young researchers on Ethiopian and Horn of African history from postcolonial, open-mind, deconstructivist and reconciliatory and peacebuilding perspective.

Semitic Languages in Contact contains twenty case studies analysing various contact situations involving Semitic languages. The languages treated span from ancient Semitic languages, such as Akkadian, Aramaic, Classical Ethiopic, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Ugaritic, to modern ones, including languages/dialects belonging to the Modern Arabic, Modern South Arabian, Neo-Aramaic, and Neo-Ethiopian branches of the Semitic family. The topics discussed include writing systems, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The approaches range from traditional philology to more theoreticallydriven linguistics. These diverse studies are united by the theme of language contact. Thus, the volume aims to provide the status quaestionis of the study of language contact among the Semitic languages. With contributions from A.

This paper examines cases in which the Biblical Hebrew particles ‫ֹא‬ ‫ל‬ and ‫ל‬ ַ ‫א‬ exhibit an independent syntactic status by expressing only negation. This type of negation is not accompanied by any supplementary existential meaning, and it conveys the negation as the main focus of a clause. An independent syntactic status of the negative particles is mostly revealed in one-member and elliptical clauses. The elliptical or one-member clauses that contain only a negative particle should be considered predicates in a functional sense. Like Biblical Hebrew, English usually employs for these constructions elliptical or one-member clauses that present only the negative particle "no," and in older stages of English also "nay." Other infrequent constructions in which sole negation is put in a predicative status in Biblical Hebrew are ‫ֹא‬ ‫ל‬ ‫-‬ ‫הוּא‬ (Jer 5:12), and ‫ֹא‬ ‫ל‬ ‫-‬ ‫ן‬ ‫כֵ‬

The article examines the methods of rendering personal names and place names in the Samaritan version of Saadya Gaon's translation of the Pentateuch in MS BL OR7562. The examination is based on examples from Genesis 11 to Exodus 1, which are part of the first hand stage in the manuscript. The renderings are compared to those found in various manuscripts and printed editions of Saadya Gaon's translation of the Pentateuch in Hebrew and Arabic script, in the Samaritan Arabic translation of the Pentateuch, given in two different versions, the old one and its later revision, in Shehadeh's edition, and in pre-Saadyan Arabic translations.

This paper examines the question of the expression of time in Semitic nominal sentences. 1 In verbal sentences, verbal predicates usually indicate time. Nominal sentences do not have verbal predicates, but they also frequently express time. The absence of verbal predicates in nominal sentences produced other means for expressing time, viz. copula, verb of existence, adverb of time, etc. The application of such means and others in Semitic languages is discussed and demonstrated below.

This paper examines translation patterns for Biblical Hebrew nominal and verbal clauses in the Arabic translation of Saadya Gaon. The examination is based on three major versions (Derenbourg edition, Îasid edition, and Ms. St. Petersburg), but considers other versions as well (Ms. Add. 1008 held in Cambridge, Constantinople, London and Paris Polyglots, and Geniza fragments). Although the data reveals differences among the various versions, it is possible to trace consistent syntactical patterns of nominal and verbal clauses typical of Saadya's translation. These patterns shed light on the syntactical characteristics of Saadya's Arabic, and they reflect well the original Biblical Hebrew word order.

This article takes issue with two proposals made in recent scholarship concerning the development of the Proto-Semitic phoneme / †/ in Iron Age Canaanite dialects: 1) retention of this phoneme in the dialects of Transjordan, and 2) its merger with the phoneme /t/ in the Hebrew of northern Cisjordan. The article argues that both proposals are untenable. Proposal (1) is based on a problematic interpretation of Judg. 12:5-6 and of the spellings of an Ammonite royal name in an Ammonite seal impression (b¨lys¨∞ ) and in Jer. 40:14 (Ba¨alis). Moreover, this proposal is contradicted by the evidence of Neo-Assyrian spellings of Transjordanian proper names, which testify to the merger of / †/ with /s/: uru As-tar-tu (the city of Ashtaroth) and likely also m Ba-a'-sa (a royal name which is argued to derive from the original root b¨ †). Proposal (2) is contradicted by the evidence of Hebrew inscriptions from northern Cisjordan, which consistently render the Proto-Semitic / †/ with the letter s. It is possible that the phoneme / †/ was initially retained in the Hebrew of northern Cisjordan, but there is no positive evidence to support such a possibility. Hence, it is more reasonable to uphold the view that the merger of / †/ with /s/ was characteristic of all Iron Age Canaanite dialects.

This article investigates the nature of the support that the anÒar showed towards ¨Ali and MuÌammad respectively, and whether it could in either case have been based on kinship. In particular, it considers whether the anÒar were likely to have supported ¨Ali for the succession at the death of MuÌammad, and if so, whether their support for him would have been based on their kinship to him. The article argues that kinship could not have been a factor in the support that the anÒar showed towards MuÌammad at the time of his move to Yathrib, and could not have motivated the anÒar in favour of ¨Ali at the time of the death of MuÌammad. It maintains instead that the anÒar's later affinity towards ¨Ali stemmed from their worsening circumstances over the period of the early caliphate, and from the feelings of frustration and alienation they came to share with him.

Minhaj al-dukkan wa-dustur al-a¨yan fi a¨mal wa-tarakib al-adwiya al-nafi¨a lil-insan ('The management of the [pharmacist's] shop and the rule for the notables on the preparation and composition of medicines beneficial to Man') is a manual for pharmacists composed in the year 658/1260 in Cairo by the otherwise unknown Abu 'l-Muna Dawud b. Abi NaÒr al-Kuhin al-¨A † †ar al-Haruni al-Isra'ili, from his name a Jewish druggist. Minhaj al-dukkan was composed in the period covered by the Genizah, but hitherto no such manuscript has been identified. We were able to identify T-S Ar. 40.91 as a fragment of chapter two of Minhaj al-dukkan. In this article we will present a transcription and translation of T-S Ar. 40.91, followed by a description of the sources and materia medica referred to. Finally, we will show that this fragment is a remnant of one of the earliest manuscripts of Minhaj al-dukkan found so far.

Recent issues of Antiquity have seen much
discussion on the topic of Carthaginian infant
sacrifice: was it a Graeco-Roman fiction or
did it really happen? There are strongly held
opinions on both sides of the argument, with
much resting on the age profile of the children
interred at the cemetery known as the
Carthage Tophet. Here, the authors respond
to claims by Smith et al. (2011, 2013) that
their ageing of the infants and children was
incorrect, and so also by extension was their
interpretation that not all interments at the
Tophet were the result of sacrifice.

... complicated form of being was created. These ideas not only found their way into Aristotelian elemental theory but also into the theories of other philosophers, for instance those whose theories are laid down in Arabic in the texts of the Jabir ibn Hayyan-corpus. ...

Chacune des trois religions monothéistes/abrahamiques prétend être un don de Dieu à l'humanité et une miséricorde divine pour tous les peuples de la terre ; c'est ce qui lui donne son aspect universaliste. Mais, en même temps, chacune d'entre elles a été fondée à une époque de l'histoire bien déterminée, dans un certain endroit géographique, et dans un contexte culturel spécifique. Outre la doctrine, le temps, le lieu, et la culture de chacune de ces religions lui ont donné une identité particulière. Ce « particularisme » entre en conflit, parfois collision, avec les « particularismes » des civilisations où chacune de ces religions tente d'entrer pour épanouir son universalisme.

Al-Dustur al-bimaristani by Ibn Abi 'l-Bayan forms an important part of the Arabic tradition of hospital dispensatories and has remained well-known to the traditional practitioners of the Middle East. So far, eleven fragments of the Dustur have been identified in the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collections at the Cambridge University Library, of which eight are in Arabic script and three are in Judaeo-Arabic. This article discusses the significance of these fragments, particularly those in Judaeo-Arabic. We also provide editions and translations of two of the fragments.

... of a complete surah and of the narrative portions of it appears to be a rare operation in either traditional or modern Muslim tafsir ... an in its context as recited (eg, Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur'an [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986]; and Martin, "Under-standing ...

Energicus Energicus/energic/energetic and an-nūn al-muʾakkida/nūn at-tawkīd (al-xafīfa wa-ṯ-ṯaqīla) in Arabic are parallel names for an optional ending of either single or geminate-n-which is occasionally suffixed to certain Semitic verb conjugations, particles, and prepositions. In Arabic, the energicus appears mostly in Classical Arabic and is found in many

* My deep gratitude is due to artist John Homeh, Daniel d-Rabi Yukhannan d-Qasha Daniel d-Baz, Maria d-Rabi Shayen d-Baz, Mariam, Andriyus and Anwar for their extraordinary help, patience and hospitality, and for their interest in salvaging the linguistic wealth of ...

Karaite grammatical thought originated in the ninth or even the eighth century CE. It had its roots in Masoretic literature and in the Arabic tradition of grammar. Scholarly study of Karaite grammatical tradition was given new impetus when the second Firkovitch Collection held in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg and containing the majority of extant Karaite linguistic manuscripts became open to international scholars. Hitherto a number of Karaite grammatical treatises have been edited and the origins, periodization and characteristic features of this tradition studied. Yet further surviving treatises must be reconstructed and grammatical concepts investigated in more detail before a complete account of the Karaite linguistic teachings can be given.

ABSTRACT MS New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America 2761, preserves an Arabic version in Hebrew characters of Galen's commentary to Hippocrates On foods, including an introduction by Sergius of Resh'aina, who translated the Greek into Syriac. Neither this translation nor the introduction had been known to exist. The introduction, which follows the canonical eight-fold formula of accessores ad auctores, is an extremely rich document for the history of commentaries to scientific texts. Sergius' observations on the similarities in elusive writing between Hippocrates and Plato are particularly interesting.

This is a description of the complex behaviour and interrelationships of the copular system in Zakho. Substantival and adverbial rhemes, compound tenses (perfect and progressive), as well as presentatives, are all part of this system. In addition the compound tenses are opposed to other verbal forms. The component order is highly relevant in differentiating between the different patterns and allo-patterns of the copular system. Included in the description is a treatment of the copular presentative which poses various problems in this language. The description is texteme-sensitive: there are marked differences in both distribution and function of the different copular expressions (even between different persons of the same copula) depending on supra-clausal conditions, that is, narrative or dialogue. In addition, a particular sub-genre, the personal experience narrative (PEN), has all sorts of peculiarities which are accounted for separately.

While there is currently a growing body of academic literature on Arabic Rap and Hip Hop, former research, instead of investigating the content of this genre in a systematic way, has opted for select readings of choice artists or distanced theorizations about Arabic Rap as a general phenomenon. Presently, there is either too little engagement with lyrical content and too much focus on ethnomusicological or cultural studies approaches which instead of content consider musical intertextuality, an individual artist’s biography, corpus, or their sociopolitical milieu. As a generic inquiry, this project conducts an Integrated Content Analysis to characterize the diversity of themes represented in Arabic rap lyrics as a means to asses some of the claims previous scholarship has made. A fully integrated content analysis consists of mutually informing qualitative, quantitative, computational and manual approaches to content analysis. As primary data, this project created a sample of 100 Arabic language rap and hip-hop tracks released between the years 2008-2017, which were selected using a stratified random sampling strategy. 16 of these tracks were fully analyzed. In the final conclusion, I present an adaptation of Simpson’s Index of Diversity to introduce a means to measure the thematic diversity of the genre of Arabic rap based on a given sample. This project seeks to revitalize the humanities with a bit of technical rigor and as a last attempt to resuscitate the undead, parochial, and ethically troubled discipline of Middle Eastern Studies.

Authors of Middle Sabaic texts (lst-4th centuries AD) quite often express their dependent status by the following formulae: X bn Y 'dm bn Z, or X bn Y `bd bn Z with their variants (first of all X bn Y 'dm dZ. Bn Z of these formulae was usually interpreted as a clan group which was considered to be the patrons of their clients Banu Y. 4 But in 1980 Beeston proposed another interpretation...

This paper begins with a consideration of the nature of referentiality. A distinction is drawn between objective reference, which exists outside language, and subjective reference, which I argue may be imposed on the world by language. I argue that while agreement is a grammatical phenomenon, as traditionally believed, it has close links with the notion of subjective reference. On the basis of this, I argue that definiteness is a properly referential, and denotative phenomenon. I go on to show that the relative 'elements' such as alla∂i and illi which occur in various varieties of Arabic are not pronouns, but rather markers of definiteness, and that al-in Sudanese Arabic can be regarded as a 'defi-

... same tripartite form and chiastic progression that characterize or inform the rites of passage and of sacrifice. ... 16 Abu 'All Ahmad b. Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Marzuql, Sharh Diwan al-Hamasah, ed ... Amln and 'Abd al-Salam Harun (Cairo, 1968), n, 827; Abu Zakariyya Yahya b. 'All ...

... 34:17), and He also instructed Moses to divide the Promised Land by lot when it had been conquered;8 Joshua duly did so.9 Micah ... 49 For thirteenth-century nuns choosing an apostle (as patron saint) by lot, see GG Coulton (tr.), Life in the Middle Ages, 1 (Cambridge 1928), 69f. ...

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).

This paper begins with a consideration of the nature of referentiality. A distinction is drawn between objective reference, which exists outside language, and subjective reference, which I argue may be imposed on the world by language. I argue that while agreement is a grammatical phenomenon, as traditionally believed, it has close links with the notion of subjective reference. On the basis of this, I argue that definiteness is a properly referential, and denotative phenomenon. I go on to show that the relative 'elements' such as alla∂i and illi which occur in various varieties of Arabic are not pronouns, but rather markers of definiteness, and that al-in Sudanese Arabic can be regarded as a 'defi-

This article takes issue with two proposals made in recent scholarship concerning the development of the Proto-Semitic phoneme /†/ in Iron Age Canaanite dialects: 1) retention of this phoneme in the dia-lects of Transjordan, and 2) its merger with the phoneme /t/ in the Hebrew of ...

Among Alexander of Aphrodisias's works, a key-role is played by his treatise On the Principles of the Universe. It contains Alexander's exegesis of Aristotle's theory of the unmoved mover, as in Metaphysics Lambda and in Physics VIII. Its original Greek text is lost, but a sixthcentury Syriac version and two tenth-century Arabic ones are still extant. All these versions have already been published, and two of them have been rendered into modern languages (English, French, Italian) in the last ninety years, but a really deep textual comparison between them, aiming at the reconstruction of the lost Greek text, has not yet been made. Usually, a key-role is given to the second, later Arabic version of it, mostly since it is more complete than the other ones. Here, a philological re-examination of the history of the textual transmission of Alexander's work is given, and some new conclusions about it are suggested, according to which the role of the first Arabic version, and that of the Syriac one in particular, are found to be more important than hitherto suspected. 1 R. Goulet and M. Aouad, 'Alexandros d'Aphrodise', in R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. I (Paris 1989), 125-39. As Goulet and Aouad recall, 'il est peu d'auteur anciens dont l'oeuvre soit aussi dispersée; traduction directe et indirecte; versions syriaques, arabes, hébraïques, latines; des nombreux titres enfin, attestées par les biobibliographes arabes, mais dont l'authenticité est parfois remise en question par les spécialistes' (DPhA I, 1989, 127). 2 Relevant literature in S. Fazzo, 'Alexandros d'Aphrodise', in R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, Supplément (Paris 2003), 61-70.

The teaching of Hebrew at Ca' Foscari officially began in 1965, under the guidance of Franco Michelini Tocci and continued until today thanks to researchers and professors specialised in Bible Studies, as well as modern Hebrew, Israeli culture and Jewish Studies more generally. Earlier than that, the early '50s had seen the birth of a short-lived Hebrew lettorato taught by two rabbis, Elio Toaff and Leone Leoni, thanks to an agreement between Ca' Foscari and the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities. Basing upon archival documents and interviews with some of the people involved, this essay aims to reconstruct the development of the teaching of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Venice, contextualising it within the history of Italian Orientalism and that of the Jews of Italy in the period that goes from 1950 to today. Summary 1 Venice, December 1950. -2 Hebrew and Orientalism in Modern Italy. -3 The Teaching and Studying of Hebrew at Ca' Foscari from 1965 Onwards. -4 'To One Hundred and Fifty'. Keywords Hebrew. Jewish Studies. Orientalism. Venice. Jewish history. 54 Miccoli. 'Ad me'ah ve-hamishim 150 Years of Oriental Studies at Ca' Foscari, 53-64