#aramaic — Public Fediverse posts

Some talks from EABS and NACAL

Today’s deal: 2-for-1 on conference reports.

European Association for Biblical Studies Annual Conference, 20-23 July 2026, Leuven

This was my first time visiting this conference, prompted by co-chairing (with Nili Samet) the new research unit Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics. This research unit will return for next year’s EABS in London (CfP to go public by the end of October). For those who are already interested in submitting an abstract:

The Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics research unit invites submissions for the 2027 London meeting in two areas:

1. An open session (or several open sessions) exploring Biblical Hebrew, broadly defined, from both traditional and innovative research perspectives. This includes various methodologies such as classical philology, linguistic analyses informed by both established and up-and-coming linguistic theories, emerging digital research methods, and others.
2. A special session focused on non-Tiberian traditions of Biblical Hebrew, whether attested in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the Modern period.

For all sessions, we especially encourage young researchers to present their work in progress or recent findings and are open to dedicated panels on the topic of ongoing research projects within the field of Biblical Hebrew. Abstracts should clearly state the presentation’s research question, (anticipated) conclusion, and relevance.

Revisiting Leuven for this year’s edition was a lot of fun and I think our first BHLL sessions went very well. At some point after getting back, however, I lost the little notebook I brought to the talks. So here are some vague recollections, going by the programme.

Kristin Weingart (LMU Munich) talked about the sources for royal reigns mentioned in Kings and Chronicles. She plausibly distinguished between “real, reconstructed, and imagined sources”. The book of Kings’ “Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah” etc. probably refers to historically real documents. The “Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 Kgs 11:41), however, stands out and was probably made up or inferred by a later writer as the source behind the data on Solomon’s reign. The biblical book of Chronicles, in turn, cites all kinds of sources like “the miḏrāš of the Prophet Iddo” that are probably not real and may have been motivated by the Greek tradition of sources-based historiography. I actually wonder whether this use of miḏrāš (from d-r-š ‘to seek, investigate’) is a calque of Greek ἱστορία.

Na’ama Pat-El (UT Austin) elaborated on her idea that the *-t- in some BH weak verb infinitives is historically unrelated to the feminine suffix. Historically I’m not sure, but she presents very compelling evidence that at least synchronically it’s not a feminine marker.

Tania Notarius (University of the Free State/Polis Institute) argued that the Ugaritic function of ṯʿy-priest, held by the most important scribe of the preserved Ugaritic corpus (Ilimilku), was related to the cult of the rpu͗m (Rephaim).

Svenja Lueg (VU Amsterdam), who unfortunately couldn’t make it in person, talked about differential object marking with ditransitive verbs, an underexplored part of BH syntax.

Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge) presented on the question of narrative yiqṭol and weqaṭal in BH.

Raanan Eichler (Bar-Ilan University), also online, showed that the ləḇīḇōṯ that Amnon had Tamar prepare him probably derive their name from lēḇ in the sense of ‘(female) chest’ and were most likely intended as suggestively breast-shaped dumplings.

The last morning saw our special session on new advances in linguistic periodization of BH:

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) continued the debate over the validity of linguistic periodization, especially (if I recall correctly) in light of his own recent work.

I presented a case study of a method developed by Chiara Bozzone to employ Homeric formulas for dating purposes and whether it can be applied to BH, using the example of a certain formula in the Holiness Code (H) and (arguably) post-H texts.

John Screnock (University of Oxford) highlighted some statistical arguments against the periodization model that emerge from a full consideration of the data.

Natascha Grabowsky (Technical University Dortmund) examined the distribution of different year-dating formulas and the possible implications for the dating of the relevant texts.

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen), also on the sceptical side, noted some changes that don’t behave neatly and ways in which the complicated history of redaction and vocalization plays tricks on us.

Finally, Nili Samet (Bar-Ilan University) presented some of the same kind of complex changes and, among other things, introduced what I think she called the Late Spelling Paradox: increasing plene spelling in Late Biblical Hebrew sometimes disambiguates archaic forms that could be plastered over by the reading tradition in earlier texts where they were spelled defectively. As a result, sometimes archaic features seem to increase in frequency in late texts, if you identify them based on the vocalized Masoretic Text.

And beyond our research unit, I enjoyed the last talk of the conference (one of several in parallel) by Innocent Himbaza (University of Fribourg), who suggested that Psalm 37 is half early and half late, with late additions alternating with parts of the early base text.

49th North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, 30 September-2 October 2026, Paris

Probably my favourite conference, which I hadn’t attended since covid, in one of my favourite cities, let’s gooo

Lots and lots of interesting talks and conversations here, but for the sake of brevity I’m just going to mention the ones I took notes on and my own.

The talks were off to a strong start with Simon Korneev‘s (University of Cambridge) argument for epiglottal, rather than pharyngeal consonants in Semitic. This can explain the vowel fronting effects they cause in various languages and traditions. Handy rule of thumb for identification in the field: “If it sounds like Louis Armstrong, it’s probably epiglottal.”

Maarten Kossmann (Leiden University) compared the consonantal phonemes of two corpora of Eastern Libyco-Berber inscriptions to his reconstruction of Proto-Berber (Proto-Amazigh) and found that the represented LB is neither an ancestor nor a descendant of Proto-Berber, but likely a sister language. We miiight be able to make it ancestral to PB if we assume they didn’t write glottal stops (realized as creaky voice or some other suprasegmental feature on the vowel?).

Lior Laks, also presenting on behalf of Maha Nassar (both Bar-Ilan University) presented their research into Western European (especially English) loanwords into Palestinian Arabic as seen online and tried to explain why you sometimes get doublets like kōran vs. tkōran ‘to get covid’. The availability and productivity of periphrastic alternatives (e.g. axad dūš ‘to take a shower’ competing with tdawwaš) plays a large part in explaining how loanwords are adapted.

Matthew Morgenstern (Tel Aviv University) presented a talk he had wanted to give at our DOT workshop on Semitic reading traditions, speaking on Mandaic. Looking at spelling, it’s important to note that published Mandaic texts are almost all from manuscripts that postdate the 16th century CE. The earlier (5th-7th c. CE), magical texts often show more conservative from an Aramaic perspective, defective spelling. But interestingly, what is now identified as the ancestor of the Mandaic script, that of Elymaean Aramaic (early 2nd-early 3rd c. CE), already has widespread plene spellings of word-internal long a. So this was not a Mandaic innovation. In other ways, the Mandean tradition, which never developed a full vocalization system, largely relied on oral transmission of how to pronounce the texts. Only after the disastrous cholera epidemic of 1831 was this partially supported by Arabic transcriptions.

Mila Neishtadt (recently Tel Aviv University) very deftly combined two earlier ideas and lots of data on the representation of Aramaic š as either š or s in Arabic place names. In a nutshell, earlier borrowing gives s (as expected) and later borrowing gives š, with the geographic distribution (mostly š in Lebanon and the Galilee) resulting from mountain villages sticking to Aramaic for longer.

Julien Dufour (École normale supérieure) presented some very compelling but hard to interpret evidence that Modern South Arabian derived verbs used to have a voiceless consonant prefix wherever Arabic and Akkadian have u prefix vowels, notably in the D-stem as well as the C-stem. Dufour suggests these are ultimately all the same prefix, but that the one on the D-stem (and some other places) was already partially lenited in Proto-Semitic. Full, detailed handout presumably forthcoming on his Academia page.

I presented my ongoing work on reconstructing the North Semitic letter names as part of our alphabet project. Lots of great feedback on traditions I had missed and questionable steps in my argumentation.

Ahmad Al-Jallad (Ohio State University) and Alessia Prioletta (CNRS) argued that the Ge’ez script does not descend from Ancient South Arabian but is just one member of the larger South Semitic script family, closer in some ways to various Ancient North Arabian varieties (which just means everything apart from Ancient South Arabian). Only took them two slides to flip me from very sceptical to fully convinced. (Ahmad is giving a related talk in Leiden in two weeks, details upon request.)

Enam al-Wer‘s (University of Essex) keynote address gave an overview of the sociolinguistic research into Arabic conducted by her and her students over the past decades. One interesting coincidence that stood out to me is that the border between what they call Horani and Mu’abi dialects in Jordan pretty much aligns with the Moabite border before Mesha’s revolt, which was not the Arnon. I don’t think there’s a direct historical connection, but I wonder what in the landscape there makes Wadi al-Hedan (pronunciation corrected by Prof. al-Wer) a more natural border than Wadi Mujib.

Hugo Cartwright (independent researcher) kindly provided a talk to fill a gap in the program, presenting his computational research on alphabetic orders in abjads. You can check out his work at www.abjads.org.

Maarten Mous (Leiden University) and five not physically present co-authors presented a big finding from the Cushitic realm. The Mbugu people of Tanzania speak both “Normal Mbugu”, a not very exciting Bantu language, and “Inner Mbugu”, which has large-scale lexical replacement and is often cited as a mixed language. Mous et al. now find that the most archaic layer of the Inner Mbugu lexicon is closely related to Dahalo, the phonologically very exotic (East? South? Narrow?) Cushitic language spoken by a hunter-gatherer group in Kenya. They posit that a now extinct “Old Dahaloan” language, spoken by pastoralists, provided both the core Inner Mbugu lexicon and the target of shift for the ancestors of the present-day Dahalo, who quite probably originally spoke some other language.

Finally, Massinissa Garaoun (CNRS) presented an in-depth investigation of the toponymy of the Canary Islands. By connecting features in the landscape to Amazigh words for body parts, he was able to show to the full satisfaction of those audience members who know what they are talking about that they are etymologically Amazigh (Berber), not para-Berber or something else.

Greatly enjoyable as both of these conferences were, they will also remain linked in my memory to the passing of three individuals. Hector Patmore, one of the organisers of the Leuven EABS meeting, tragically and suddenly passed away on 13 September 2026; see In Memoriams here. Harry Stroomer, Leiden University professor emeritus of Afro-Asiatic languages and cultures, died on 19 July 2026 (In Memoriam here); NACAL opened with a presentation in his memory by Marijn van Putten (Leiden University). Furthermore, Marijn’s own talk (on the apparently irregular preservation of a verbal noun prefix in Berber) was based in part on comments made by, and formally co-presented with, brilliant NACAL-goer Adam Strich (Harvard University), who died on 10 January 2019. זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה (Proverbs 10:7).

Somehow #whiteEvangelicals, #christianNationalists, the #farRight, and none of the #ultraConservatives who claim to protect and fight for "#Christian traditional family values" are lined up to learn the original language #Jesus spoke: #Aramaic.

Nor do they do #pilgrimage to one of the last two #Syrian towns where #WesternAramaic is still spoken: Maaloula.

https://yawna.org/

#hypocrisy #democracy #christianity #history #syria #languageLearning

Looked up the couple of #Aramaic inscriptions from Georgia earlier today and have been stuck in a Caucasian alphabets hole since then

Living culture of three writin...

Ashkenazi Jews

Author’s Note: This post has mentions of Nazis, the Holocaust, & Nazi Germany. We completely understand if you wish to skip over this post. We’ll catch you in the next one!

Also known as Ashkenazic Jews, Ashkenazis, or Ashkenazim.

This is a form of distinct ethnic subdivision of the Jewish Diaspora. Emerging from the Jewish communities that consolidated during the 10th century in the Rhineland (Western Germany) & northern France. They migrated there from centers such as the Italian peninsula & the Southern Levant. This includes present-day Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, & Jordan.

After numerous massacres of Jews during the Crusades (11th-13th centuries), they began a gradual eastward migration due to mounting restrictions within the Holy Roman Empire & the favorable policies of Casimir the Great & others.

This diaspora ramped up after the persecution during the Black Death of the 14th century. The bulk of the Ashkenazi Jews had migrated to the Kingdom of Poland (which includes modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, & parts of Russia). This area became the main center of Ashkenazi Jewry until the Holocaust.

Ashkenazim adapted their traditions, rites, & customs to Europe. They traditionally followed the German rite synagogue ritual & until the Holocaust primarily spoke Yiddish, an offshoot of Middle High German written in a variety of the Hebrew script, with significant Hebrew, Aramaic, & Slavic influences.

The Yiddish language progressively declined in prestige, in favor of national languages & Hebrew, being stigmatized by assimilationists & later also Zionists. Though it was spoken by over 11 million people worldwide before the Holocaust. The Yiddishist movement, which sought to preserve & revive the language, faded through the 20th century. Including Duolingo adding Yiddish as a language.

As a proportion of the world Jewish population, Ashkenazim were estimated to be 3% in the 11th century, rising to 92% in 1930, near the population’s peak. The Ashkenazi population was significantly diminished by the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany during WWII, which killed around 6 million Jews. Before WWII, the estimated worldwide Jewish population was 15.3-16.7 million, with 92% being Ashkenazi. As of 2023, the population of Ashkenazim was estimated to be around 10-13 million out of 15.8 million total Jews.

The name Ashkenazi comes from the biblical figure of Ashkenaz. He’s the 1st son of Gomer, grandson of Japhet, great-grandson of Noah, & a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations. The name for Gomer has often been linked to the Cimmerians.

The Biblical Ashkenazis are usually derived from Assyrian Askuza, a people who expelled the Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates. The name Askuza is identified with the Scythians.

In Jeremiah 51:27, Ashkenaz figures as 1 of 3 kingdoms in the far north, the others being Minni (or Mannaea), an ancient kingdom that flourished in northwestern Iran, & Arrat (corresponding to Urartu), called on by God to resist Babylon.

Ashkenaz is linked to Scandza/Scanzia (usually identified with Scandinavia), viewed as the cradle of Germanic tribes, in the 6th-century gloss to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius. In the 10th century, in the History of Armenia of Yovhannes Drasxanakertci, Ashkenaz was associated with Armenia.

As it was occasionally in Jewish usage, where its denotation extended at times to Adiabene, Khazaria, Chimea, & areas to the east. They’re also identified with the Slavim or Slavs. In keeping with the custom of designating areas of Jewish settlement with biblical names, Spain was called Sefarad (Obadiah 20), France was called Tsarefat (I Kings 17:9), & Bohemia was called the Land of Canaan.

Given the close links between the Jewish communities of France & Germany following the Carolingian unification, the term Ashkenazi came to refer to the Jews of both medieval Germany & France.

In later times, the word Ashkenaz is used to designate southern & western Germany, the ritual of which sections differs somewhat from that of eastern Germany & Poland. Thus, the prayer book of Isaiah Horowitz (a prominent rabbi & mystic), & many others, give the piyyutim (a Jewish liturgical poem), according to the Minhag of Ashkenaz & Poland. A Minhag is an accepted tradition or group of traditions in Judaism.

In a religious sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is any Jew whose family tradition & synagogue ritual follow Ashkenazi practices (German rite). Until the Ashkenazi community 1st began to develop in the Early Middle Ages, the centers of Jewish religious authority were in the Islamic world, at Baghdad & Islamic Spain. German Ashkenaz was so geographically distant that it developed a minhag of its own.

The counterpart of Ashkenazi is Sephardic. Since most non-Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews follow Sephardic rabbinical authorities, whether or not they’re ethnically Sephardic. By tradition, a Sephardic or Mizrahi (a.k.a. Oriental Jews; Jews who lived in the Muslim world) who married into an Orthodox or Haredi (a.k.a. ultra-Orthodox) Ashkenazi Jewish family raises her kids to be Ashkenazi Jews.

On the other hand, an Ashkenazi woman who married a Sephardi or Mizrahi is expected to take on Sephardic practices & the kids will “inherit” a Sephardic identity. Though in practice, many families do compromise. A “convert” usually follows the practice of the rabbinical court (beth din) that converted them.

Culturally, an Ashkenazi Jew can be identified by the concept of Yiddishkeit, which means “Jewishness” in the Yiddish language. Before the Haskalah (a.k.a. the Jewish Enlightenment) & the emancipation of Jews in Europe, this meant the study of the Torah & the Talmud for men, & communal life governed by the observance of Jewish Law for men & women.

From the Rhineland to Riga (the largest city in Latvia) to Romania, most Jews prayed in liturgical Ashkenazi Hebrew, & spoke Yiddish in their secular (worldly) lives. But with modernization, Yiddishkeit now includes not just Orthodoxy & Hasidism, but a broader range of movements, ideologies, practices, & traditions in which Ashkenazi have participated & somehow kept a sense of Jewishness. Although pockets of Jews still speak Yiddish, Yiddishkeit can be identified in manners of speech, styles of humor, & in patterns of association.

As Ashkenazi Jews moved away from Europe, mostly in the form of aliyah to Israel. Or immigration to North America, South Africa, Europe (particularly France), & Latin America, the geographic isolation has given way to mixing with other cultures, & with non-Ashkenazi Jews who, similarly, are no longer isolated in distinct geographic locales.

Hebrew has replaced Yiddish as the primary Jewish language for many Ashkenazi Jews. Although many Hasidic & Hareidi groups still use Yiddish in daily life. Aliyah is the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to, historically, the geographic Land of Israel or the Palestine region, where the State of Israel was established.

France’s blended Jewish community is typical of the cultural recombination that’s going on among Jews throughout the world. Although France expelled its original Jewish population in the Middle Ages, by the time of the French Revolution, there were 2 distinct Jewish populations.

One consisted of Sephardic Jews, originally refugees from the Inquisition (which no one expects! Sorry, we’re Monty Python fans here.) & concentrated in the southwest. While the other community was Ashkenazi, concentrated in formerly German Alsace, & mainly speaking a German dialect similar to Yiddish.

The 3rd community of Provencal Jews living in Comtat Venaissin was technically outside France, & was later absorbed into the Sephardim. Comtat Venaissin (called Comtat, for short) was a part of the Papal States from 1274 to 1791.

But after emancipation, a sense of a unified French Jewry emerged, especially when France was wracked by the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s. (We’ll be doing a post about the Dreyfus Affair.) In the 1920s & 30s, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe arrived in large numbers as refugees from antisemitism, the Russian Revolution, & the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.

By the 1930s, Paris had a vibrant Yiddish culture, & many Jews were involved in diverse political movements. After the Vichy years & the Holocaust, the French Jewish population was augmented once again, 1st by Ashkenazi refugees from Central Europe, & later by Sephardi immigrants & refugees from North Africa, many of them francophone. Francophone refers to people/organizations who use French (language) regularly.

Ashkenazi Jews didn’t transmit their traditions or achievements by text. Instead, these traditions were passed down orally from one generation to the next. The desire to maintain pre-Holocaust traditions relating to Ashkenazi culture has often been met with criticism by Jews in Eastern Europe.

In an ethnic sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is a descendant of the Jews who settled in the Central European region of “Ashkenaz.” For roughly 1,000 years, the Ashkenazim were a reproductively isolated population in Europe.

Despite living in many countries, with little inflow or outflow of countries from migration, conversion, or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Since the mid-20th century, many Ashkenazi Jews have intermarried, both with members of other Jewish communities & non-Jews.

Religious persecution of the Jews in Western & Central Europe led to a significant migration of the Ashkenazi Jews into Eastern Europe. This resulted in a major cultural divide between Western/Central & Eastern Ashkenazi communities. In particular, this was reflected in the division of Yiddish into Western & Eastern Yiddish dialects. As well as in other cultural distinctions: traditions, food, dress, etc.

Initially, the Jews of Eastern Europe enjoyed relative freedom in terms of movement, being invited by the kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Over time, the situation was reversed. By the 19th century, the Jews in the West had gradually been integrated into the general society.

While the Eastern Ashkenazi maintained their strict Jewish traditions & were mostly confined to ghettos, especially in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, which incorporated a considerable amount of land where the Eastern Ashkenazi lived: Poland & Lithuania.

Well-known differences in practices include:

• Observance of Passover (Pesach)
  • Ashkenazi Jews traditionally refrain from eating legumes, grain, millet, & rice. Quinoa has become accepted as a food grain in North American communities. Sephardi Jews typically don’t prohibit these foods.
• Notwithstanding stricter requirements for the ACTUAL slaughter, Sephardi Jews permit the rear portions of an animal after proper Halakhic removal of the sciatic nerve. While many Ashkenazi Jews don’t.
• Ashkenazi Jews often name newborns after deceased family members, not after living relatives. Sephardi Jews often name their kids after their grandparents, even if those grandparents are still living. An exception to this is among Dutch Jews, where Ashkenazi for centuries used naming conventions otherwise attributed exclusively to Sephardim, such as Chuts. Chuts is the name given to Jews who immigrated to London from the Netherlands in the 1850s-1860s.
• Ashkenazi tefillins are wound toward the body, not away from it. Ashkenazim put on the tefillin while standing up. Other Jews generally do so while sitting down. A tefillin(s) is/are sets of small black leather boxes with leather straps having scrolls of parchment written with verses of the Torah inside.
• The prayer shawl (tallit/tallis) is worn by all Ashkenazi men AFTER marriage. Except for Western European Ashkenazi men who wear it from the bar mitzvah. In Sephardi or Mizrahi Judaism, the prayer shawl is commonly worn from early childhood.

The term Ashkenazi also refers to the Nusach Ashkenaz, the liturgical tradition used by Ashkenazi Jews in their siddur (prayer book). A nusach is defined by a liturgical tradition’s choice of prayers, the text of prayers & melodies used in the singing of prayers. 2 other major forms of nusach among Ashkenazi Jews are Nusach Sefard (not to be confused with the Sephardic ritual), which is the general Polish Hasidic nusach, and Nusach Ari, used by those in Chabad.

Make a one-time donation

Your contribution is appreciated.

Make a monthly donation

Your contribution is appreciated.

Make a yearly donation

Your contribution is appreciated.

Rate this:

Very cool: there's a 14th-century #Greek translation of some biblical books including Daniel that switches to a (pseudo-)Doric dialect for the #Aramaic section!

brill.com/view/journals/...

A little bit of Lycian

Lycian is a first-millennium BCE language of the Anatolian family, a subgroup of Indo-European. It was written with its own, funky alphabet, and as such it is currently relevant to my interests. One of the longest texts happens to be a Lycian-Greek-Imperial Aramaic trilingual:

Reading up on Lycian in Melchert (2008; paywalled) the other day, I was really interested to read that the letters transliterated as b, g, d were fricatives: [β], [ɣ], [ð]. They seem to have shifted from the expected *b, *g, *d, based both on reconstruction and the letters used. This raises two short questions, to which I welcome your input:

1. As in Modern Greek, the otherwise unvoiced stops p, t, k were voiced after nasals. So, just like Modern Greek, Lycian can add a dummy nasal to write a voiced stop in other positions, as in Ñtarijeus– for Darius. How cool is that?
2. This looks very similar to what happened to Greek at some point. Could this be some kind of effect of Greek-Lycian contact? Does Modern Greek have a Lycian substrate?!

Quoting Ñtarijeus– reminds me of the other point I wanted to make:

Cases such as hrppi “above” or sñta (a numeral) seem to indicate that liquids and nasals had syllabic allophones, and the standard view is that the special letters ñ and m̃ stand for syllabic nasals. This may have been true when the graphemes were invented, but this analysis cannot account for postvocalic occurrences such as qãñti “they slay.” The gemination in hrppi (see below) argues that at the phonetic level the pronunciation was [hərp.pi] with an anaptyctic vowel. If one makes the reasonable inference that the same is true for nasals (sñta=[sənta]), then one may make the generalization that ñ and m̃ occur only in syllable-final position. This distribution suggests that they are unreleased allophones of the nasal consonants.

Melchert (2008: 50)

Melchert’s reasoning seems sound to me (although, shouldn’t that be [sənda]?), but I balk at the mention of unreleased nasals. Are these phonetically possible? If the air doesn’t come out your nose, how do you know it’s a nasal? Do any other languages have this?

Instead, maybe the Lycian lenition of voiced plosives we just saw can help us out here too. While this also relies on exotic sounds, perhaps we are dealing with lenition of the nasal stops too. If prevocalic *n and *m lenited to [ð̃] and [β̃], but syllable-final *n and *m remained nasal stops, a reshuffling of the letter signs makes for a plausible distribution that, at least, only relies on sounds that we can imagine how to pronounce: n spells [ð̃], ñ spells [n], m spells [β̃], and m̃ spells [m].

That’s all for now; don’t forget to Lyc and subscribe.

New paper: Arabic in the Nabataean papyri

An online preview of my new article with Sigrid Kjær, ‘Arabic in the Nabataean papyri, including P.Yadin 7’, appeared on the Journal of Semitic Studies website last weekend.

Abstract: The impact of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian on the Nabataean corpus is well known. While Arabisms in the Nabataean inscriptions have received significant attention, the small, yet crucial corpus of Nabataean papyri remains relatively understudied in this regard. In this study, we reassess the possible North Arabian loanwords, especially those suggested by the first editors of the papyri and by Ada Yardeni in various separate studies. Based on the criteria of phonology, morphology, and attestation, we conclude that roughly half of the suggested examples cannot plausibly be attributed to borrowing from Arabic or other North Arabian languages. The low but significant number of remaining, plausible Arabisms strongly cluster in the semantic field of legal and financial technology, supporting the view that Arabic influence on Nabataean may have been more restricted in scope than has long been thought.

Enjoy!

Another nice one: Imperial #Aramaic אגור 'temple' (neutral) > later Aramaic 'shrine, altar' (pagan or otherwise heterodox)

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qbe3b7ljafblsyy4dhkkgj7t/post/3mie7szwmm22h

Finally made the connection between Imperial #Aramaic לחן 'temple servant', feminine לחנה,* and Biblical and later Aramaic לְחֵנָה 'concubine', 'wench' or something like that. * That's 𐡋𐡇𐡍 and 𐡋𐡇𐡍𐡄 for my fellow Unicode freaks

I'm learning #Akkadian, and whatever happy neurochemical is prompted by recognizing old friends, I love that seeing a cognate for a term I already know in a different Semitic language triggers the same response.
eqlum = field
Why hello, old חקל!
šemûm
Good to see you again, שמע!
#Hebrew #Aramaic

Hey, I reconstructed some #Aramaic letter names! Going back to around 500 BCE, I guess. The similarity to #Greek is usually explained via #Phoenician, but we don't actually have any Phoenician letter names AFAIK.

Nice overview of some #Aramaic script types.

Aramaic - Examples of writing

The perils of paleographic dating: a few Aramaic examples from Arabia

My last post included a quote by Michael Macdonald that concluded:

This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.

This is in reference to the second of the three inscriptions on the picture below, the one that Macdonald says is in Tayma Aramaic. While most of the inscription is in something in between Imperial and Nabataean Aramaic, the first word is in nice, old-fashioned lapidary Imperial Aramaic. The effect is something like lead-in small caps in Latin typography:

Tʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ the funerary monument of …

I think this is a great point. While certain script styles may be typical of a certain time and place, that doesn’t mean they were strictly limited to that setting and you can never be 100% sure of a dating based on paleography alone. In this short post, I want to give two more examples.

First, here are two funerary inscriptions in Nabataean Aramaic (Macdonald, one of the editors, again considers the first one Tayma Aramaic). They are both dated, so we know they were written a century and a half apart (203 and 356 CE). But the earlier one has considerably more advanced letter forms than the later one. In each case, I’ll give you a transliteration in (Unicode’s pretty archaic) Nabataean and Arabic script so you can compare the letter shapes to those extremes.

𐢅𐢀 𐢕𐢘𐢜 𐢁𐢝𐢗𐢍𐢆
𐢕𐢃𐢑𐢋𐢀 𐢃𐢛 𐢍𐢈𐢖𐢘
𐢛𐢁𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢌 𐢅𐢌 𐢁𐢚𐢍𐢒
𐢗𐢑𐢇𐢈𐢌 𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢒 𐢈𐢁𐢝𐢓𐢈
𐢁𐢊𐢈𐢇𐢌 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊 𐢁𐢍𐢛
𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 𐢑𐢇𐢘𐢛𐢏𐢍𐢀

دا نفس اسعيه
نبلطا بر يو𐢖ف
راس تيمى دي اقيم
علهوي عمرم واسمو
احوهي بيرح اير
سنت 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 لهفركيا

𐢅𐢕𐢆 …
𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢊𐢕𐢌 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐 𐢛𐢍𐢜
𐢊𐢄𐢛𐢀 𐢑𐢓𐢈𐢍𐢆 𐢁𐢞𐢞𐢆 𐢃𐢛𐢞
𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢈 𐢃𐢛 𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐
𐢛𐢍𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢀 𐢅𐢌 𐢓𐢍𐢞𐢞 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊
𐢁𐢂 𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢓𐢁𐢞𐢍𐢔 𐢈𐢊𐢓𐢝𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢁𐢊𐢅𐢌 𐢃𐢛𐢞 𐢝𐢕𐢍𐢔 𐢞𐢑𐢞𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢞𐢓𐢕𐢌

دنه…
عديون بر حني بر سموال ريس
حجرا لموية اتته برت
عمرو بر عديون بر سموال
ريس تيما دي ميتت بيرح
اب سنت ماتين وحمسين
واحى برت سنين تلتين
وتمني

It’s also interesting that the older text is mostly in good Aramaic (with one or two interesting spelling mistakes), while the second one uses a more phonetic spelling of the Aramaic words and has borrowed two Arabic numbers. So the linguistic evidence at least points in the right direction, dating-wise.

The second and last example is a graffito that wasn’t published too long ago (Nehmé 2017), but that may deserve some more attention outside epigraphic circles. What appears to be the same inscription, dated to 548/9 CE, starts with the Aramaic phrase dkyr (𐢅𐢏𐢍𐢛) ‘may he be remembered’ written in a not terribly advanced Nabataeo-Arabic and then continues in the Arabic language and Paleo-Arabic script. The use of the cognate verb in the opening phrase (ذكر الإله ḏakara l-ʾilāhu ‘may God remember’) allows for a nice comparison of the two script types. Normally, we would consider these to be centuries apart, but they appear to have been inscribed by the same hand.

So remember, kids, have fun dating inscriptions paleographically, but be careful out there.

Biblical #Aramaic phrase of the day: עַתִּיק יוֹמַיָּא ʕattīq yōmayyā (indefinite: עַתִּיק יוֹמִין ʕattīq yōmīn)

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4rsec7snwsap5hzp3prgkhkn/post/3lcutlddpwk2h

Yasetel liesbukh

#BonDia
Idioma: #Aramaic
#BondDia

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

🇹🇷 **Six New Aramaic Inscriptions Unearthed at Ancient City of Zernaki Tepe in Eastern Türkiye**

🔗 https://arkeonews.net/six-new-aramaic-inscriptions-unearthed-at-ancient-city-of-zernaki-tepe-in-eastern-turkiye/.

#Archaeology #Archaeodons #Türkiye #Aramaic

Yasetel liesbukh

#BonDia
Idioma: #Aramaic
#BondDia

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

1. Only by a toddler, possibly for unrelated reasons. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic

Yasetel liesbukh

#BonDia
Idioma: #Aramaic
#BondDia

New publications and podcast

Busy year for publications (think that’s it for me this year):

Semitic *ʾilāh- and Hebrew אלהים‎: From plural ‘gods’ to singular ‘God’ (Open Access)

Abstract: The Biblical Hebrew word אלהים‎ is plural in form. Semantically and syntactically, however, it can be plural or singular. The stem of this noun can be reconstructed as * ʾilāh-. As already noted by Wellhausen, this looks like a broken plural of *ʾil-, the Proto-Semitic word for ‘god’. This article takes Wellhausen’s observation and uses it to explain the plural morphology of Hebrew אלהים‎. I argue that *ʾilāh- should be reconstructed with redundant plural suffixes in some parts of the paradigm. This reconstructed paradigm is preserved virtually unchanged in Archaic Biblical Hebrew. The reconstructed paradigm also explains the almost complete replacement of *ʾil- by *ʾilāh- in Aramaic and Arabic and allows us to reassess the reasons for the association between the lexeme ‘god’ and plural number. Consequently, earlier suggestions that see אלהים‎’s plural number as a reflection of pre-Yahwistic polytheism or as a marker of abstractness are no longer tenable.

The varying size of the Sodom coalition in Genesis 14 (in FS Tigchelaar; email me for a PDF)

Trying my hardest to find something that might interest newly retired KU Leuven professor Eibert Tigchelaar, I used some Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature as well as other textual and linguistic evidence to seek for order in the number of kings on Sodom’s side in Gen 14. Turns out that this closely aligns with other indications of different layers in this fascinating chapter: one about a local raid, one that may be a reworking of a lost epic, and a third one building on the combination of the first two. If you understand Dutch (or want to practice!), also check out this brand new episode of Timo Epping’s Oudheid, all about this question.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Canaanite #GeEz #Genesis #Hebrew #Hosea #linguistics #news #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic

Iconic quote in the CAL entry for the #Aramaic cognate of chutzpah:

Update on Mehri goats

Earlier today, I wrote:

PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go?)

It just struck me that this is one of the lexically determined words that take ḥ- as the definite article in Mehri and Harsusi, at least. Many of these words used to start with a *ʔ—like M. ḥa-ynīθ ‘women’!—but not all of them; Rubin (2018) mentions some kinship terms where it’s analogical, for instance.

The word for ‘goat’ also happens to have a suppletive plural; from memory, that’s ḥə-rawn. This is probably one of the words where the shape of the article is due to original presence of *ʔ-: Rubin compares Syriac arn-o ‘mountain goat’.

Suppose the singular is from *ʕVnᵈz– and it took the ḥ-article by analogy with the plural. That means we might expect something like *ḥ–ʕōz for ‘the she-goat’. With two pharyngeals in a row, this would be a great environment for the *ʕ to be lost, yielding the attested form, ḥ–ōz. The indefinite form, wōz, would then in turn have been formed by analogy with the definite form. IMHO, this shores up the derivation from *ʕVnᵈz– and supports loss of *n directly before another consonant in an ancestor of the MSAL (provided we can make it work for Jibbali and Soqotri as well).

#Aramaic #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic

AI reveals Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously thought

A recent study using artificial intelligence is reshaping our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, suggesting many of the scrolls are older than previously believed...

More information: https://archaeologymag.com/2025/06/ai-reveals-dead-sea-scrolls-may-be-older-than-previously-thought/

Follow @archaeology

#archaeology #archeology #archaeologynews #ArchaeologyLovers #aramaic #AI #deadseascrolls

Two new chapters

Earlier this year, two chapters I wrote a while back appeared in print. A third one should come out any moment now and I was waiting to combine all three in a single post, but it’s taking longer than expected, so here they are. Abstracts by (some of) the respective volume editors:

‘The Shape of the Teen Numerals in Central Semitic’ (Open Access)

This study reconstructs the morphology of teen numerals in Central Semitic languages, covering Northwest Semitic, Arabic, and Sabaic. The formation follows a digit-teen order with gender agreement, unlike many other Semitic languages. The digit stems largely align with previous reconstructions, but significant attention is given to the numeral ‘one’, posited as *ʿist-ān- for masculine and *ʿist-ay- for feminine forms, derived from a Proto-Semitic root distinct from the later adjectival *ʾaḥad-. The paper also examines the endings in the teen numerals, showing that the uninflecting *-a likely preserves an ancient feature. The distinct morphology of feminine forms, especially the Northwest Semitic *ʿiśrihi, reflects an innovative feminine suffix *-ihi, also evidenced in Arabic demonstratives. The study concludes that many features of the teen numerals result from both inherited and innovative elements within the linguistic group.

‘Sound Change in the Hebrew Reading Tradition’ (email me for the PDF)

Benjamin D. Suchard’s contribution (…) investigates for Biblical Hebrew “to what degree this corpus retained its phonological independence from the vernacular forms of Hebrew and Aramaic spoken by the people who transmitted it”. The text of the Hebrew Bible was fixed early on, but it does not write vowels and has a simplified spelling also in other respects. On the other hand, vocalizations as codified in the Tiberian reading tradition show that the text of the Hebrew Bible was also orally transmitted. Suchard argues that these vocalizations provide evidence for two categories of sound change affecting the orally transmitted text: vowel changes that also occurred in the (Hebrew or Aramaic) vernacular, and vowel changes that have no parallel in the vernacular. According to Suchard, then, there is evidence that the Hebrew reading tradition resisted vernacular sound changes, and even that it underwent sound changes that did not take place in the vernacular. Suchard proposes that these changes took place while Hebrew was still a spoken language.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

The Real Names of Jesus and His Disciples
✝️
During the Christian Holy Week, a look at the names of the apostles & their leader through the lens of linguistics
https://medium.com/@weareji/the-real-names-of-jesus-and-his-disciples-d0d95460396a?sk=91ccdaea74b9f86f341266828dbcea7d
⛪️
#language #linguistics #Easter #Bible #Jesus #Apostles #Disciples #Christianity #HolyWeek #GoodFriday #PalmSunday #Palestine #Aramaic #Greek #Hebrew

I'm working on an original translation of the Bible. My goal is to let the words of scripture guide my translation rather than reading a favored theology into the text. As the saying goes, "Where the Bible speaks, we speak, where it is silent, we are silent." In addition to being a formal equivalence, I try to preserve original idioms (with clarification in the footnotes), poetic and metaphorical language, and distinct synonyms (ie. land/ground/dust) where possible.

The text is available under a Creative Commons license. And it is available at a website, and as an ebook, though it is still incomplete.

Please support my translation work:
☕ https://ko-fi.com/wltbible
📖 https://wlt.ct.ws

#Bible #Tanakh #Torah #Religion #Christianity #Christian #Church #ChurchOfChrist #Judaism #Jewish #MessianicJudaism #LGBTQIA2S #LGBTQIA #LGBTQ #LGBT #Transgender #Nonbinary #Agender #CreativeCommons #CCBY #FOSS #Translation #Language #Literature #Books #English #Hebrew #Aramaic #Greek