#aramaic — Public Fediverse posts

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

The Semitic languages show a regular correspondence of p in some languages and f in others. For instance, ‘mouth’ in Akkadian is p-ū; Biblical Hebrew pe; Biblical Aramaic pūm; Ge’ez ʾäf;1 and Classical Arabic fam-. (Modern South Arabian should have an f too, but has replaced this word.) This sound is uncontroversially reconstructed as Proto-Semitic *p, as in *p-ūm ‘mouth’.2 Traditionally, the change of *p to f was taken as a diagnostic feature of the South Semitic languages.

[p] to [f], a plosive changing into a fricative, is an example of lenition. Lenition is a common type of sound change, so we tell our students, so it makes sense that *p is the older sound and it changed to f. So far, so good.

While preparing my first couple of classes for Comparative Semitics this year, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about this anymore. Two things bother me:

1. The examples of p > f I know about are all part of a larger change affecting other plosives too, like Grimm’s Law (Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, *kw > Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *h, *hw and related changes) or Aramaic and Hebrew BGDKPT-spirantization. Is just p turning to f really so common? How about just f turning into p?
2. Most scholars don’t accept the family tree above anymore. In the current model, the changes look more like this:

Now we need three or four separate instances of *p > *f—just as I’m starting to doubt how common that change is. Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), who argue for this second family tree, explain this as an areal change that spread through contact. But what kind of a contact scenario should we think of here? Did f spread from Ancient South Arabian (if those languages even had it) to all its neighbours? It’s not like we see enough other shared contact features to confidently posit a South Semitic language area or something.

Looking at Afroasiatic, things don’t get better:

• Berber has f, not p
• Cushitic has f, not p
• Egyptian has p and f, but we don’t know which one corresponds to Semitic *p (if either)
• Chadic: same as Egyptian, to my knowledge
• (I’m not sure Omotic is Afroasiatic, still reading up on this)

So if we posit Proto-Semitic *p, either we need two more independent cases of *p > *f (Berber, Cushitic),3 maybe more (Egyptian? Chadic?), or we reconstruct *f for Proto-Afroasiatic and say Proto-Semitic changed *f to *p. At which point, why not cut out the middleman and keep *f, then change it to *p in East and Northwest Semitic? Just two changes instead of the minimum of six you need otherwise.

So, are there any good arguments to reconstruct Proto-Semitic *p—or should we press *f and leave behind this relic from theories that believed in a South Semitic subgrouping?

1. Probably influenced by Cushitic, but we can still take it as related to the other Semitic words. ↩︎
2. In my opinion, the only word known so far with a superheavy syllable, exceptionally permitted because the word is monosyllabic. ↩︎
3. I’m also really starting to doubt that Cushitic is one family. So maybe make that four (Berber, Beja, Agaw, East/South Cushitic). ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/11/07/froto-semitic/

#Afroasiatic #Agaw #Akkadian #Ancie #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthAr #Omotic #ProtoSemitic

SBL International: some talks I attended

(Live tweeting conferences is out; post hoc blogging about them is the new thing.)

Last week saw the 2024 Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, advertised with pictures like this:

despite being held about an hour’s walk from where that picture was taken, at a place that looks like this:

It’s nicer on the inside.

As an International Meeting, this was considerably smaller than the SBL’s Annual Meetings in the US, with only(!) some 550 attendees. Unlike the gargantuan Annual Meeting I attended in 2018, I actually found this quite manageable and even enjoyable. And like the Annual Meeting, there were lots and lots of talks and other events. Here’s an overview of some of the ones I attended, in chronological order.

After some admirably concise and entertaining opening words by Steed Davidson (SBL Executive Director) and Bert-Jan Lietaert Peerbolte (VU Amsterdam), the conference kicked off on Sunday afternoon with a reception. Great snacks, 4/5, would be received again.

Monday talks:

• John Will Rice analyzed passages in the books of Kings on “the sin of Jeroboam” and argued that at an earlier stage, this was Jeroboam (I)’s establishment of a “Battei Bamoth” sanctuary at an unnamed location, with non-Levitical priests, and a different festival calendar. This was later conflated with a separate tradition on Josiah destroying an altar at Bethel to make Jeroboam responsible for building that altar and putting a golden calf idol there. Rice suggests this was done to avoid the awkwardness of having Josiah destroying an altar that was now believed to have been built by the patriarch Jacob.
• Jorik Groen gave a great talk (as his co-supervisor and one-time coauthor, I’m completely unbiased) exploring and explaining the different uses of Biblical Hebrew בּוֹא and English to come. Slides here.
• Drawing on previous work by Yochanan Breuer and new research, Yosef Ofer presented some cases where the cantillation of the Masoretic Text reflects a mix of competing traditions. The main case study was on Isaiah 45:1, where cantillators disagreed about whether God is calling the Persian king Cyrus his Messiah or not:

• A session on the Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database talked about the semantics of עֶבֶד ‘slave’ or ‘servant’ (Cornelius Haposan Sinaga), חוֹתָם ‘seal’ (Marjo Korpel), and the hapax legomenon חַשְׁמַנִּים, possibly ‘amethysts’ (a posthumous suggestion by Meindert Dijkstra presented by Paul Sanders).
• Ivri Bunis and myself presented something we’ve been meaning to work on for a while now, connecting his observations on medial deixis pronouns with prefixed hallā- with some stuff I’ve done on similar-sounding presentatives in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Slides here.
• In the same session, Dong-Hyuk Kim presented a recent analysis that says English “adverbs of time and place” like here, there, then, now and so forth should actually be seen as intransitive prepositions and applied it to Biblical Hebrew (which is harder, as adverbs are less clearly marked than in English). It sounds weird, but I was fully convinced.

Tuesday talks:

• Nili Samet asked: whose voice do we hear in the pessimistic, life-negating “Better Than” proverbs in Qohelet 7:1–9? Not Qohelet’s: it contradicts his philosophy elsewhere in the book. Not a later editor’s, either, as the passage is well integrated into the book and Qohelet comments on it. Nor that of classical wisdom, as it contradicts the world view of Proverbs, for example. Drawing on parallels in Tractate Avot and Ben Sira, Samet makes a plausible case that Qohelet is critically quoting another wisdom school from the Hellenistic period, that would end up influencing pre-Rabbinic and early Rabbinic wisdom literature.
• Kyle Young reconsidered Alexander Sperber’s choice of a manuscript on which to base his edition of Targum Onqelos and concludes that while it’s not perfect, it’s acceptable until something better comes along.
• In my second talk this conference, I went before the Pentateuch section to ask them why, if you believe the E source is a thing, Genesis 14 can’t be its missing beginning. For the (mostly European) scholars present, the answer is “we don’t believe in E so who cares lol” (to be fair, I’m not sure I do either). But they were very nice about it, had helpful methodological pointers, and seemed to be convinced by some possible connections I suggested between Genesis 14 and other texts. Slides here.
• The last session I attended on Tuesday focused on Qumran Cave 11, with non-Biblical texts that were published by a Dutch team. Eibert Tigchelaar (KU Leuven 🥳) gave us some historical background on two (given time constraints, mainly one) of the leading scholars, one of whom was problematic (as in publishing 1940 pamphlets on “The Jewish Question” problematic). David Shepherd showed that the Job “Targum” from Cave 11 does not yet employ a Targumic translation technique, like earlier translations into Aramaic. And Rebekka Luther also talked about the Job Targum (pace Shepherd), arguing that its translator purposefully edited it to change (improve?) the picture of Job it presents.

Wednesday talks:

• Charbel El-Khaissi presented his ongoing PhD research on the generalization of the definite article in Syriac, showing that this was a gradual development in some environments. I like the data-heavy approach.
• Margaretha Folmer (Leiden University 🥳) presented three marginal linguistic features in Targumei Onqelos (Pentateuch) and Jonathan (Prophets). Besides being very interesting in their own right, that they appear in the same way in both targumim supports the view that these are written in practically the same form of Aramaic, which bears on the history of their translation and transmission.
• Emanuel Tov, in his eighties now, is the doyen of Dead Sea Scrolls research, so it was cool to attend his talk on correctional practices at Qumran. Lots of ḋȯṫṡ and strikethroughs.
• Against the dominant (in Europe) view that the Priestly source ends in Leviticus or even Exodus, Bruna Velcic made a strong case that the spies narrative in Numbers 13 and 14 really is Priestly too (and not just post-Priestly), based both on form and contents. No conclusion on where P does end.
• I got to chair a session featuring four speakers from Scriptura (Elizabeth Robar, Ian Atkinson, Drew Longacre, and Joseph Habib), talking about poetry, mainly Psalm 68, a major source of headaches for everyone involved.

Thursday was a half day. I attended both of the sessions on the study of pre-modern Judaism in the Low Countries, including:

• Jonathan Stökl (Leiden University 🥳)’s enigmatically, even ominously titled talk “Elefantine…” considered different models for the religious identity of the Judean(?) community on the southern border of Achaemenid Egypt. Should we call them Jews, Yahwists, or something else altogether?
• Willem Smelik presented on the practice of adding cantillation marks to targum manuscripts and possible implications for liturgical and study practice.
• Joachim Yeshaya (until recently[?], KU Leuven 🥳) told us about Abraham Ibn Ezra, one of the great commentators and poets of Sepharad, and the connection between his poetry and his commentary on the Song of Songs.

Finally, a shoutout to Matthew Saunders, who attended the conference without presenting, but who also maintains a very in-depth blog on Semitic languages.

All in all, it was great to have so many people come hang out and present their work at a half-an-hour train ride from my house. They should do that more often. I look forward to seeing a lot of the ideas presented last week in print soon and, hopefully, the people presenting them too.

#Aramaic #Bible #conference #DeadSeaScrolls #Exodus #Genesis #Hebrew #Isaiah #Kings #linguistics #news #Numbers #Pentateuch #Psalms #Qohelet #SongOfSongs #Targum

SBL International: some talks I attended

(Live tweeting conferences is out; post hoc blogging about them is the new thing.)

Last week saw the 2024 Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, advertised with pictures like this:

despite being held about an hour’s walk from where that picture was taken, at a place that looks like this:

It’s nicer on the inside.

As an International Meeting, this was considerably smaller than the SBL’s Annual Meetings in the US, with only(!) some 550 attendees. Unlike the gargantuan Annual Meeting I attended in 2018, I actually found this quite manageable and even enjoyable. And like the Annual Meeting, there were lots and lots of talks and other events. Here’s an overview of some of the ones I attended, in chronological order.

After some admirably concise and entertaining opening words by Steed Davidson (SBL Executive Director) and Bert-Jan Lietaert Peerbolte (VU Amsterdam), the conference kicked off on Sunday afternoon with a reception. Great snacks, 4/5, would be received again.

Monday talks:

• John Will Rice analyzed passages in the books of Kings on “the sin of Jeroboam” and argued that at an earlier stage, this was Jeroboam (I)’s establishment of a “Battei Bamoth” sanctuary at an unnamed location, with non-Levitical priests, and a different festival calendar. This was later conflated with a separate tradition on Josiah destroying an altar at Bethel to make Jeroboam responsible for building that altar and putting a golden calf idol there. Rice suggests this was done to avoid the awkwardness of having Josiah destroying an altar that was now believed to have been built by the patriarch Jacob.
• Jorik Groen gave a great talk (as his co-supervisor and one-time coauthor, I’m completely unbiased) exploring and explaining the different uses of Biblical Hebrew בּוֹא and English to come. Slides here.
• Drawing on previous work by Yochanan Breuer and new research, Yosef Ofer presented some cases where the cantillation of the Masoretic Text reflects a mix of competing traditions. The main case study was on Isaiah 45:1, where cantillators disagreed about whether God is calling the Persian king Cyrus his Messiah or not:

• A session on the Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database talked about the semantics of עֶבֶד ‘slave’ or ‘servant’ (Cornelius Haposan Sinaga), חוֹתָם ‘seal’ (Marjo Korpel), and the hapax legomenon חַשְׁמַנִּים, possibly ‘amethysts’ (a posthumous suggestion by Meindert Dijkstra presented by Paul Sanders).
• Ivri Bunis and myself presented something we’ve been meaning to work on for a while now, connecting his observations on medial deixis pronouns with prefixed hallā- with some stuff I’ve done on similar-sounding presentatives in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Slides here.
• In the same session, Dong-Hyuk Kim presented a recent analysis that says English “adverbs of time and place” like here, there, then, now and so forth should actually be seen as intransitive prepositions and applied it to Biblical Hebrew (which is harder, as adverbs are less clearly marked than in English). It sounds weird, but I was fully convinced.

Tuesday talks:

• Nili Samet asked: whose voice do we hear in the pessimistic, life-negating “Better Than” proverbs in Qohelet 7:1–9? Not Qohelet’s: it contradicts his philosophy elsewhere in the book. Not a later editor’s, either, as the passage is well integrated into the book and Qohelet comments on it. Nor that of classical wisdom, as it contradicts the world view of Proverbs, for example. Drawing on parallels in Tractate Avot and Ben Sira, Samet makes a plausible case that Qohelet is critically quoting another wisdom school from the Hellenistic period, that would end up influencing pre-Rabbinic and early Rabbinic wisdom literature.
• Kyle Young reconsidered Alexander Sperber’s choice of a manuscript on which to base his edition of Targum Onqelos and concludes that while it’s not perfect, it’s acceptable until something better comes along.
• In my second talk this conference, I went before the Pentateuch section to ask them why, if you believe the E source is a thing, Genesis 14 can’t be its missing beginning. For the (mostly European) scholars present, the answer is “we don’t believe in E so who cares lol” (to be fair, I’m not sure I do either). But they were very nice about it, had helpful methodological pointers, and seemed to be convinced by some possible connections I suggested between Genesis 14 and other texts. Slides here.
• The last session I attended on Tuesday focused on Qumran Cave 11, with non-Biblical texts that were published by a Dutch team. Eibert Tigchelaar (KU Leuven 🥳) gave us some historical background on two (given time constraints, mainly one) of the leading scholars, one of whom was problematic (as in publishing 1940 pamphlets on “The Jewish Question” problematic). David Shepherd showed that the Job “Targum” from Cave 11 does not yet employ a Targumic translation technique, like earlier translations into Aramaic. And Rebekka Luther also talked about the Job Targum (pace Shepherd), arguing that its translator purposefully edited it to change (improve?) the picture of Job it presents.

Wednesday talks:

• Charbel El-Khaissi presented his ongoing PhD research on the generalization of the definite article in Syriac, showing that this was a gradual development in some environments. I like the data-heavy approach.
• Margaretha Folmer (Leiden University 🥳) presented three marginal linguistic features in Targumei Onqelos (Pentateuch) and Jonathan (Prophets). Besides being very interesting in their own right, that they appear in the same way in both targumim supports the view that these are written in practically the same form of Aramaic, which bears on the history of their translation and transmission.
• Emanuel Tov, in his eighties now, is the doyen of Dead Sea Scrolls research, so it was cool to attend his talk on correctional practices at Qumran. Lots of ḋȯṫṡ and strikethroughs.
• Against the dominant (in Europe) view that the Priestly source ends in Leviticus or even Exodus, Bruna Velcic made a strong case that the spies narrative in Numbers 13 and 14 really is Priestly too (and not just post-Priestly), based both on form and contents. No conclusion on where P does end.
• I got to chair a session featuring four speakers from Scriptura (Elizabeth Robar, Ian Atkinson, Drew Longacre, and Joseph Habib), talking about poetry, mainly Psalm 68, a major source of headaches for everyone involved.

Thursday was a half day. I attended both of the sessions on the study of pre-modern Judaism in the Low Countries, including:

• Jonathan Stökl (Leiden University 🥳)’s enigmatically, even ominously titled talk “Elefantine…” considered different models for the religious identity of the Judean(?) community on the southern border of Achaemenid Egypt. Should we call them Jews, Yahwists, or something else altogether?
• Willem Smelik presented on the practice of adding cantillation marks to targum manuscripts and possible implications for liturgical and study practice.
• Joachim Yeshaya (until recently[?], KU Leuven 🥳) told us about Abraham Ibn Ezra, one of the great commentators and poets of Sepharad, and the connection between his poetry and his commentary on the Song of Songs.

Finally, a shoutout to Matthew Saunders, who attended the conference without presenting, but who also maintains a very in-depth blog on Semitic languages.

All in all, it was great to have so many people come hang out and present their work at a half-an-hour train ride from my house. They should do that more often. I look forward to seeing a lot of the ideas presented last week in print soon and, hopefully, the people presenting them too.

#Aramaic #Bible #conference #DeadSeaScrolls #Exodus #Genesis #Hebrew #Isaiah #Kings #linguistics #news #Numbers #Pentateuch #Psalms #Qohelet #SongOfSongs #Targum

Petite bouteille à la mer : est-ce que l'un ou l'une d'entre vous connaitrait quelqu'un qui connaitrait quelqu'un qui parlerait #araméen #aramaic ?

Petite bouteille à la mer : est-ce que l'un ou l'une d'entre vous connaitrait quelqu'un qui connaitrait quelqu'un qui parlerait #araméen #aramaic ?

Petite bouteille à la mer : est-ce que l'un ou l'une d'entre vous connaitrait quelqu'un qui connaitrait quelqu'un qui parlerait #araméen #aramaic ?

Petite bouteille à la mer : est-ce que l'un ou l'une d'entre vous connaitrait quelqu'un qui connaitrait quelqu'un qui parlerait #araméen #aramaic ?

Petite bouteille à la mer : est-ce que l'un ou l'une d'entre vous connaitrait quelqu'un qui connaitrait quelqu'un qui parlerait #araméen #aramaic ?

A little over a year ago, originally due to an interest in the deeper history of #compilers, I started diving deep into the #Talmud, studying #Aramaic, #gematria, and doing #DafYomi etc in what has become my deepest engagement with the rabbinic corpus yet -- the Talmud isn't a compiler but rather an extensible interpreter, compiled by compilers over the course of many centuries (build times have gotten *significantly* faster, my G-d), with novel extensions in the form of rabbinic commentary, glossia and the like being added nearly every century by publishers competing to compile the most elegant editions (Vilna Shaws being paradigmatic). And through studying Talmud and the greater body of rabbinic literature I've found myself encountering #magic/sorcery occasionally, and I just gotta say -- the #SICP metaphor of programming as pure magic, with the #hacker as a sorcerer, goes insanely deep when you start to dig into it.

#scheme #lisp #judaism

Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic

While reviewing proofs for an article that should appear soon, it struck me that the shape ordinal numerals like ‘third’, ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’ take in Semitic provides some evidence for subgrouping that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Quick recap: most scholars today accept something like the following family tree for Semitic, as compellingly presented by Huehnergard & Rubin (2011).

I’m generally skeptical about West Semitic as a group because I think everyone’s favourite West Semitic innovation, the *qatala perfect, may be a retention from Proto-Semitic. But among some other innovations (I particularly like relative/demonstrative *θū > *ðū), this subgroup is supported by the shape of the ordinals. Akkadian has a *CaCuC– pattern, as in:

• Old Babylonian šaluš– ‘third’, rebu– < *rabuʕ– ‘fourth’, ḫamuš– ‘fifth’
• Old Assyrian rabū-t-um ‘the fourth (f.)’, rabū-ni ‘our fourth witness’, ḫamuš-ni ‘our fifth witness’

In West Semitic, the normal ordinal has a different, *CāCiC- pattern, as in:

• Classical Arabic θāliθ-, rābiʕ-, ḫāmis-
• Ge’ez śaləs, rabəʕ, ḫaməs
• Mehri (Modern South Arabian) śōləθ, rōbaʕ, ḫōməs
• probably also Sabaic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫms; Ugaritic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫmš…

In the rest of Northwest Semitic, one trace of this pattern might be found if the consonantal spelling tltʔ in Daniel 5:16 (Biblical Aramaic) stands for *tālítā ‘as the third one’ (Suchard 2022: 224). Otherwise, Aramaic and Canaanite have a different pattern: *CaCīC– followed by the nisbe suffix, which has a special shape in Aramaic. Examples:

• Biblical Hebrew šlīšī, rḇīʕī, ḥămiššī (probably influenced by šiššī ‘sixth’, itself a new formation for expected **šḏīšī)
• Syriac tliṯoy, rbiʕoy, ḥmišoy

So, we have three patterns: *CaCuC-, *CāCiC-, and *CaCīC–īy/āy-. Which one is oldest and which ones are innovative?

Interestingly, Ge’ez and Modern South Arabian both have a special set of numerals that specifically refer to periods of time like days:

• Ge’ez śälus, räbuʕ, ḫämus
• Mehri śīləθ, rība, ḫayməh

In the article I’m proofreading, I argue these can all be reconstructed as *CaCuC-. This also matches Biblical Hebrew ʕāśōr ‘tenth (day)’ and may be related to dialectal Arabic names for the days of a the week like ʔaθ-θalūθ and ʔar-rabūʕ (borrowed from Sabaic???). This matches the Akkadian pattern for the normal numerals, which also happens to be attested with reference to a period of time in Old Assyrian ḫamuš-t-um. It’s more likely for an old formation to be preserved in a specialized use like referring to numbers of days than for something specific like that to be generalized for ordinals in all contexts. *CāCiC– also has an obvious origin, as this is the productive pattern for active participles and we can imagine a kind of shift from ‘being third’ as a participle to ‘third’ as an ordinal. So in terms of innovations, this looks like:

1. Proto-Semitic: *CaCuC- (preserved in East Semitic/Akkadian)
2. Proto-West-Semitic: innovates *CāCiC-, preserves *CaCuC- for counting days etc.

*CaCīC–īy/āy– is so restricted that it is most attractive to see this as a late innovation shared by Canaanite and Aramaic. If so, that would support Pat-El & Wilson-Wright’s (2018; paywalled?) argument on other grounds that these two families form a subgroup within Northwest Semitic.

1. Proto-Aramaeo-Canaanite or Aramaic and Canaanite as an areal grouping: innovate(s) *CaCīC–īy/āy-, cleans up *CāCiC– with remarkable efficiency

An intermediate *CaCīC– pattern without the nisbe suffix added might be attested in Biblical Hebrew šālīš, which not only means ‘one-third (of some unknown measure)’ but is also a military rank that has traditionally been explained as the ‘third man’ on a chariot besides the primary warrior and the driver.

This pattern also forms fractions in Aramaic, as in Imperial Aramaic rbyʕ and Syriac rbiʕ-t-o ‘quarter’. So maybe we should see the pre-Aramaeo-Canaanite development as a shift from still very active-participle-y *CāCiC– to more productively adjectival *CaCīC-, with the extra adjectival nisbe suffix being added later for good measure. Maybe that last step took place after the ordinals had started to shift in meaning to fractions (which are nouns, not adjectives), giving something like *rabīʕ–īy– an original literal meaning like ‘quarter-y’.

In conclusion, an ordinals-based family tree ends up looking like this:

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/03/ordinal-numerals-as-shared-innovations-in-semitic/

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

Natalie Raupach <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Can you please let me know about [...] placing an article on [site]?

I'm #excited by this possibility! To keep within the #design and #audience of my site, the #design #guidelines are:

* maximum 350 words
* in #iambic #pentameter
* any language you wish, but include a translation into 1+ of: Old #Aramaic, #Sumerian, or #Enochian

Rates start at a reasonable USD 35,000 / month with a 12-month contract.

Looking forward to working with you.

Gzella, H. (2011). Languages from the World of the Bible. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781934078631 #OpenAccess #OA #Language #Languages #Bible #AncientNearEast #Ancient #TextualHistory #Theology #Religion #Book #Books #Ebook #Ebooks #Bookstodon #Academia #Academic #Academics #Ugaritic #Phoenician #Hebrew #Aramaic #Persian #Greek @bookstodon (34)

Vegan and Veg Passages From Unexpected Sources (Middle East, and Christianity) - New Blog Entry: https://santmatradhasoami.blogspot.com/2022/11/vegan-and-veg-passages-from-unexpected.html

#vegan #vegetarian #christianity #vegetarianchristians #BartEhrman #LostChristianities #VegSayingofJesus #BasilTheGreat #SaintJerome #VegPodcasts #Syriac #Aramaic

Hey #fedivere, suggest some people to follow?

My interests:
#LGBTQ
#Transgender and #transrights
#Progressive #Judaism, culturally, spiritually, textual, and academic
#queer fashion
#Memoirs - especially for those who fall under the above groups
#Linguistics, specifically #Yiddish (my mother tongue), #Hebrew and #Aramaic (my 2nd and 3rd languages), ancient #MiddleEastern, and all #Judeo- languages
#History

And the intersections of all the above.

NOT looking for more cis-straight men.

Hey #fedivere, suggest some people to follow?

My interests:
#LGBTQ
#Transgender and #transrights
#Progressive #Judaism, culturally, spiritually, textual, and academic
#queer fashion
#Memoirs - especially for those who fall under the above groups
#Linguistics, specifically #Yiddish (my mother tongue), #Hebrew and #Aramaic (my 2nd and 3rd languages), ancient #MiddleEastern, and all #Judeo- languages
#History

And the intersections of all the above.

NOT looking for more cis-straight men.

Hey #fedivere, suggest some people to follow?

My interests:
#LGBTQ
#Transgender and #transrights
#Progressive #Judaism, culturally, spiritually, textual, and academic
#queer fashion
#Memoirs - especially for those who fall under the above groups
#Linguistics, specifically #Yiddish (my mother tongue), #Hebrew and #Aramaic (my 2nd and 3rd languages), ancient #MiddleEastern, and all #Judeo- languages
#History

And the intersections of all the above.

NOT looking for more cis-straight men.

Hey #fedivere, suggest some people to follow?

My interests:
#LGBTQ
#Transgender and #transrights
#Progressive #Judaism, culturally, spiritually, textual, and academic
#queer fashion
#Memoirs - especially for those who fall under the above groups
#Linguistics, specifically #Yiddish (my mother tongue), #Hebrew and #Aramaic (my 2nd and 3rd languages), ancient #MiddleEastern, and all #Judeo- languages
#History

And the intersections of all the above.

NOT looking for more cis-straight men.

Hey #fedivere, suggest some people to follow?

My interests:
#LGBTQ
#Transgender and #transrights
#Progressive #Judaism, culturally, spiritually, textual, and academic
#queer fashion
#Memoirs - especially for those who fall under the above groups
#Linguistics, specifically #Yiddish (my mother tongue), #Hebrew and #Aramaic (my 2nd and 3rd languages), ancient #MiddleEastern, and all #Judeo- languages
#History

And the intersections of all the above.

NOT looking for more cis-straight men.

Late reminder: tomorrow, 9 November 2022, #ISAWNYU Visiting Research Scholar Christina Chandler will present "#Seals and Status: Text and Images from the #Persepolis Fortification Archive" at 1pm US Eastern Time. Free and online, but registration required in advance.

More info and to register: https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/seals-and-status

#ancientHistory #ancientNearEast #epigraphy #Aramaic #archaeology #BeforeModernTimes #cuneiform #Elamite