Puzzling Out the Past: Studies in Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures in Honor of Bruce Zuckerman. Edited by Marilyn J. Lundberg; Steven Fine; and Wayne T. Pitard. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 55. Leiden: BRill, 2012. Pp. xvi + 334, illus. $245.

Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact. By Benjamin J. Noonan. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, vol. 14. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2019. Pp. xxxv + 512. $149.95.

Although Sinai 357 is one of the longest and best-preserved early alphabetic inscriptions from Serabit el-Khadem, these characteristics have not made it any easier to interpret. Most scholars read it as a command from a mining foreman to one of his subordinates, but this reading creates logical and contextual problems. To avoid these problems, I read Sinai 357 as a votive inscription to the Hurrian deity Teššob that employs language similar to first-millennium Northwest Semitic dedicatory inscriptions. Such a reading (...) reflects cultural and linguistic contact between speakers of Egyptian, Hurrian, and a Northwest Semitic language at the site of Serabit el-Khadem. (shrink)

This article has a few goals. The first goal is to discover the development of Semitic pointing systems such as Babylonian Hebrew (both simple and complex), Tiberian Hebrew, Palestinian Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew, Syriac (both Western [Jacobite] and Eastern [Nestorian]) and Arabic. The second goal is to propose the possible development because of the interaction between those languages in the past. In this article, the comparative method will be used as the methodology. A general observation of these signs and (...) a proposition regarding the possible development amongst those languages will be presented. CONTRIBUTION: This article traces the synchronic and diachronic development of Semitic languages' vocalisation systems and proposes a possible development between them. (shrink)

This article studies the ways in which Arab intellectuals in Egypt and the Levant wrote about modern anti-Semitism during the four decades preceding the demise of the Ottoman Empire. This period is often described as the era of the Arab Nahda (revival); it refers to an era when Arab thinkers and writers showed great interest in the Arabic language, Islamic history, and Arab culture and consumed European literary and philosophical works. Arab intellectuals in this period wrote about Jewish affairs. They (...) protested the persecution of Jews in Eastern and Western Europe and compared anti-Jewish racism to an infectious disease that spread in Europe’s cities and destroyed the fabric of its democracy, especially during the Dreyfus affair. I argue that these very pro-Jewish positions were connected to several conversations about the Arab self. Since the Arabs were categorized as Semites in European racial discourses, the meanings ascribed to the term were of utmost important to them. Arab writers also connected their discussions of anti-Semitism to their broader interest in science; as anti-Semitism seemed to have reflected a remnant from the medieval past, Arab writers wondered why this phenomenon prevailed in modern and scientific Europe. As Ottoman subjects witnessing the colonization of Egypt and North Africa, Arab intellectuals underscored the fact that Europe, whose intellectuals and politicians critiqued the persecution of Christians in the Ottoman Empire and argued that their colonization brought justice to persecuted minorities, was treating its minorities in a horrific fashion. Lastly, as Arab thinkers demanded linguistic and cultural rights within the Ottoman Empire and demanded to curb the powers of autocratic rulers, they were interested in Europe’s most glaring failed emancipation. Their reflections, moreover, could help us theorize the present moment, when Jews and Muslims struggle together against purist and racist movements in the US and in Europe. (shrink)

Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic. By Ambjörn Sjörs. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 91. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xv + 478. $140.

The topic of The Prophets' Languages has led to a broad interest due to the sacred status of the Prophets. It has been of interest to people of all religious and social orientations. Despite the complexity of this topic and the necessity of studying it from various aspects such as archaeology and the study of ancient calligraphy, we limited our study to Islamic sources and references only. We extrapolated what was mentioned in these books. Other than the Holy Qur’ān, (...) it will be concerned with books of interpretation, history, biography, hadith, its explanations, language books, etc. This study has been divided into three main points, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first point dealt with the origin of the languages spoken by the Prophets (peace be upon them) and their proximity to each other: Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. All of these languages belong to the Semitic language. In terms of their convergence and similarity with each other, some linguists considered it dialects of one language, the Semitic language of origin. It has branched out from it as a result of the expansion, development, and development of life. Looking at today, the dialects of the Arabs in Egypt, Morocco, Jazira, the Levant, and Iraq, each branched out and most of it emerged from the mother tongue Arabic. There is a discussion among researchers on which of the languages are closer to the Semitic language. Four languages are listed as possibilities: Hebrew, Babylonian, Assyrian, Syriac, and Arabic. The truth is that it is not easy to get to know the origin of the Semitic language, and everything that has been said is not outside the circle of speculation because of the loss of definitive evidence and the temporal dimension. As for the second point, this study investigated the linguistic geography that the Semitic language covered and spread in, by tracking the people who spoke the Semitic language, their places of residence, and their influence, as all of them settled in the Near East and its vicinity. If we look at the Semitic language, with its eastern and western branches, we see that it was concentrated in Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Yemen, the Levant, and Jerusalem regions, and among the most famous tribes and nations that settled in this region are Saba, Himyar, Ad, Thamud, Jirhm, Samaria, Nabat, the people of Palmyra and others. Mostly likely, the Arabian Peninsula is the cradle of the Semitic people, although some say that Abyssinia was the cradle of the first Semites. In the third point, the number of prophets and messengers mentioned in the Noble Qur’ān was enumerated in clear terms. Among the twenty-five prophets are the following: Adam, Idris, Noah, Hood, Saleh, Lot, Ibrahim, Ismail, Ishaq, Jacob, Yusef, Shuaib, Ayyub, Dhu al-Kifl, Yunus, Moses, Aaron, Elias, Al-Isa, David, Solomon, Zakaria, Yahya, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon them). The study of this point came by following the inductive and deductive approach, whereby the first approach is based on extrapolating the life of each prophet in isolation from others in detail, tracing his life, place of living, and residence, whom he married etc. The deductive method relied on deducing the language that each of the prophets (peace be upon them) spoke. Some prophets mentioned the name of the language in which he spoke in the Islamic sources. This study concluded that of the prophets mentioned in the Noble Qur’ān, seven of them spoke the Syriac language, three of them spoke the ancient Egyptian language (Coptic), eighteen of them spoke the Hebrew language, three of them spoke the Aramaic language, and nine of them spoke in Arabic. Some of the prophets spoke one language while others spoke more than one language due to their numerous travels and the people they interacted with. This study is considered a preliminary study to open the field for in-depth studies for researchers in this field, and every part mentioned in this research is suitable for being an independent scientific study in its own right. (shrink)

A much discussed morpheme in Semitic historical linguistics is the suffix *-n. Its reflexes include the energic in Classical Arabic, the ventive in Akkadian, and many languages with a [V – n – object pronoun] reflex. Explanations of its origins fall broadly into two camps. One sees it originally as a proto-Semitic verbal suffix, while the other derives it from a grammaticalization of an originally independent [deictic/presentative + object pronoun] element. This paper argues for the correctness of (...) the second explanation, to which end a general reconstruction of the historical development of the morpheme in West Semitic is developed, with particular attention given to Arabic. Although a modest and unobtrusive morpheme, it is argued that the linguistics of *-n is of considerable significance for conceptualizations of Arabic and Semitic historical linguistics. (shrink)

Semitic templates systematically encode two dimensions of verb meaning: (a) agency, the thematic role of the verb’s external argument, and (b) voice. The assumption that this form-meaning correspondence is mediated by syntax allows the parallel compositional construction of the form and the meaning of a verb from the forms and the meanings of its root and template. The root and its arguments are optionally embedded under a light verb v which introduces the agent (Hale and Keyser 1993; Kratzer 1994). (...) But this is only the unmarked case, which, in Semitic, is encoded by the simple templates. Two dimensions of markedness are introduced by two additional types of syntactic heads: (a) agency heads, which modify agency and are morphologically realized as the intensive and causative templates, and (b) voice heads, which modify voice and are morphologically realized as the passive and middle templates. Causative and middle morphemes are thus accounted for within a unified system, which, first, explains their affinity in language in general (both are found crosslinguistically as markers of transitivity alternations), and which, moreover, sheds new light on problems in the interface of semantics and morphology. One problem is the impossibility, mostly ignored in linguistic theory, of deriving the semantics of middle verbs from that of the corresponding transitive verbs. The second is explaining the identity found crosslinguistically between middle and reflexive morphology. The third is determining the grammatical function of the causee in causative constructions. (shrink)

Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context. By Aaron Michael Butts. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, vol. 11. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016. Pp. xvii + 292. $59.50.

Established in Jerusalem by the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, the first Teacher Training Seminar is a fascinating case study of the rapid change within the Jewish communities in late Ottoman Palestine. This essay focuses on the 1907 conflict between the Seminar’s management and its Eastern-European students concerning training and teaching in the modern Hebrew, a development which would later nourish the so-called “War of Languages” in 1913. These conflicts reflected the gap between immigrants who had fled anti-Semitic riots (...) in Eastern Europe and witnessed Socialist revolutions, and the experiences of Jerusalem-born students familiar with the activity of philanthropic Jewish organizations within the local children’s education system. The chasm between the nationalist educational goals of the Hebrew yishuv and the Hilfsverein’s aims of modernization and professionalization led to mutual radicalization and the establishment of a separate Zionist education system by Zionist Organisations. The staunch position in favor of teaching in Hebrew expressed the Hebrew and secular national consciousness of the immigrant student, and was evidence of their professional pedagogical goals. (shrink)

Ancient Hebrew Periodization and the Language of the Book of Jeremiah: The Case for a Sixth-Century Date of Composition. By Aaron D. Hornkohl. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 74. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. viii + 517. $210.

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 280-303.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different approaches (...) to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known about how a statistical learning mechanism copes with input regularities that arise from the structural properties of different languages. This study focuses on statistical word segmentation (...) in Arabic, a Semitic language in which words are built around consonantal roots. We hypothesize that segmentation in such languages is facilitated by tracking consonant distributions independently from intervening vowels. Previous studies have shown that human learners can track consonant probabilities across intervening vowels in artificial languages, but it is unknown to what extent this ability would be beneficial in the segmentation of natural language. We assessed the performance of a Bayesian segmentation model on English and Arabic, comparing consonant-only representations with full representations. In addition, we examined to what extent structurally different proto-lexicons reflect adult language. The results suggest that for a child learning a Semitic language, separating consonants from vowels is beneficial for segmentation. These findings indicate that probabilistic models require appropriate linguistic representations in order to effectively meet the challenges of language acquisition. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the case of Tay, the Microsoft AI chatbot that was launched in March, 2016. After less than 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment because the chatbot was generating tweets that were judged to be inappropriate since they included racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic language. We contend that the case of Tay illustrates a problem with the very nature of learning software that interacts directly with the public, and the developer's role and responsibility associated with (...) it. We make the case that when LS interacts directly with people or indirectly via social media, the developer has additional ethical responsibilities beyond those of standard software. There is an additional burden of care. (shrink)