Bethnahrin Women Protection Forces, #HSNB participation with securing the event of the 2nd Congress of الاتحاد النسائي السرياني في سوريا/The Women #Syriac Union in #Syria.[UPDATES]
HSNB wish the HNSS good luck and success in their future work...
#Project2025 #TechBros #CorpMedia #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #FeelTheBern
#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc:
"Grammatica Syriaca" by Adalbertus Merx
[Halis: Orphanotropheum, 1867-1870]
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!
Kollegienhaus Erlangen.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 1921 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.
#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic
‘Woman’ in Modern South Arabian, Amorite, and Ugaritic
EDIT: Roey Schneider reminds me he probably suggested this idea to me back in 2023! No plagiarism intended.
Some Modern South Arabian languages have a weird-looking word for ‘woman’: Mehri tēθ, Harsusi and Jibbali teθ. The θ makes it look similar to Proto-Semitic *ʔanθ–at-, which underlies Ugaritic a͗θt, Hebrew ʔiššā, Syriac <ʔntt-ʔ> at-o, Akkadian aššat- ‘wife’, etc. The same root also gives Arabic ʔunθ-ay– ‘female’1. But what about that initial t-?
SourceFor years, I’ve kind of assumed the Modern South Arabian words also come from something like *ʔanθ–at-, with the first part being lost and *θ-et then metathesizing to *teθ. It’s weird, but it was my best guess. But here’s a new guess I like better.
In late 2022 (paywalled), Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik published what they aptly referred to as “two remarkable vocabularies”, containing what is probably the first known connected text in Amorite, a Northwest Semitic language of the early second millennium BCE. One of the many surprises these texts contain is the word for ‘woman’ (unambiguously written with a Sumerogram in the Akkadian translation), ta-aḫ-ni-šum. Based on comparisons to the Semitic words above and known Amorite/Akkadian spelling conventions, this looks like *taʔnīθ-um, yet another different noun formation from the *ʔ-n-θ root. As I learned from a recent handout byTania Notarius, Ugaritic also attests a form that looks related: ti͗nθt ‘women’, ‘females’, plausibly /tiʔnīθ-āt-u/.
Both of these forms show a t- prefix, part of a pattern that usually forms abstracts—although concrete nouns in this pattern also occur, like Hebrew < Aramaic talmīḏ– ‘student’. And the Amorite, at least, lacks a feminine suffix. So that’s starting to look like our MSAL *teθ. Could this be a full cognate, with *teθ coming from *taʔnīθ-?
That depends on whether we can get rid of the first two radicals, *ʔ and *n. As far as I know, Proto-Semitic *ʔ was regularly lost on the way to Modern South Arabian. So that’s fine. What about *n, is this one of the (surprisingly) many branches of Semitic where it assimilates to following consonants? Let’s check out some likely etyma with *n before a consonant:
That’s all I’ve got, for now. The plural pronoun looks good, though. Of course, in *taʔnīθ-, the *n isn’t directly before the θ, so why should it assimilate? After assigning the stress to the first *a—a strange, but reliable rule in pre-MSAL—we could imagine something like
*táʔnīθ > *táʔnəθ (vowel reduction) >
*táʔənθ (metathesis) >
*táʔəθθ (assimilation) >
*teθθ (loss of the glottal stop, vowel contraction, MSAL vowel weirdness)
*teθ (degemination—not entirely clear whether this is regular).
Writing it out like that, the non-gemination of the θ (also word-internally, as in the Mehri dual tēθ–i) may also be a problem for assuming a derivation from the *ʔ-n-θ root.2 Still, this is commonly assumed; supporting evidence comes from the plural forms, like Mehri yənīθ, where the n is visible. So, since the t- in *teθ really does look like a prefix, I think Amorite *taʔnīθ- is an exciting form to compare.
#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Syriac #Ugaritic
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"Horae Syriacae Seu Commentationes Et Anecdota Res Vel Litteras Syriacas Spectantia" by Nicholas Patrick Wiseman
[Romae: Bourlié, 1828]
dx.doi.org/10.25673/98944
**Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library**
“_The results reveal that most manuscripts contain fewer than 20 excerpts, but a small number show much higher levels of excerpting, highlighting the immense intellectual and literary activities implicated in their production._”
Maeir N (2025) Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library. PLOS ONE 20(3): e0320265. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320265.
#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #Culture #Charts #Religion #Taxonomy #Christianity #Analysis #Philology #Syriac #Academia
Material philology and #Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library | PLOS One
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0320265
On the occasion of tomorrow's #nowruz the New Year and spring festival, which is celebrated mainly in the Persian cultural area, we would like to draw your attention to this #manuscript from 1850.
It contains a Kurdish poem of praise in #Syriac characters.
#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc
@mariam_al_masri_author @bookstodon
#Syriac is referenced extensively in the chapter.
Goosebumps. Discovering the work of Ghada Shbeir. She speaks to my mediterranean identity like no other artist.
#mediterranean #ocean #chantspolyphonique #GhadaShbeir #arabicmusic #maqam #spiritual #syriac #classicalmusic
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mPjrpbHXVQl5Cx2v6ki95-l6IK6RVrq1c&si=NyJEhXV5EXzhm02n
Prochaine séance du séminaire Manuscrits en Méditerranée ce jeudi 7 novembre, 14h, avec François Pacha Miran : Le Caire, Chypre, Jérusalem : création et circulation des manuscrits enluminés à l’Occident du monde syriaque
@campuscondorcet et accessible en ligne également
@IRHT_CNRS @bookhistodons
#manuscripts #syriac
https://manuscrits.hypotheses.org/6971
If anyone within the echo of this knows #Syriac, and wants to tell me what this MS is
https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.659
I'd love to be able to add at least a title to the listing
Publication alert: a festschrift in honor of Andreas Jückel, perhaps the foremost authority on the #Syriac #Bible in the world. I was very pleased to contribute to this volume, because Andreas was so kind and generous to me when I was writing my Master's thesis on the Philoxenian version.
The Mongol conqueror #Genghis Khan's grandson Hulegu captured #Baghdad and ended the Abbasid #caliphate in the city in 1258.
I just read a text that asserts that around 25 years later, the Muslim vizier Shams al-Din Juvayni was involved in a plot to restore the caliphate, but he was put to death when Hulegu's grandson Arghun overthrew his uncle Teguder Ahmad. This is probably just slander, but it is surprising slander in a #Syriac text written in the late 1310s!
I'm (re)reading the History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sawma.
Vulg in English: And Tobiyah & Sanballat had hired him. For he received a price, that I might be terrified
#Syriac Pesh has a longer reading, with the redundancy:
ܛܘܒܝܐ ܘܣܡܒܠܝܛ ܘܚܒܪ̈ܘܗܝ܂ ܐܓܪܘ ܘܫܕܪܘܗܝ ܥܠܝ ܠܡܩܛܠܢܝ ܡܛܠ ܕܐܓܝܪܐ ܗܘ܂ ܡܛܠ ܕܐܕܚܠ
Tobiya, Sanballat, *and his companions* hired *and sent* him *against me to kill me*, so that he was hired so that I would fear
2/?
#HebrewBible
A #Syriac technical glitch turned riddle:
What happened here?
Also important, no source for this section refers to God as anything other than "God" (#Hebrew אלהים, #Greek Θεός, #Syriac ܐܠܗܐ, #Latin Deus).
All of this changes once we move into Genesis 2:4ff. Of the 34 references to God in Genesis 2:4-4:26, only 17 achieve unanimity (barring Vulg omissions), only 50%, and sometimes which name is used for God is different. In 2:4-22, where MT has "LORD God," OG only has "God" (except 2:4, 15-18).
Yesterday, my colleague Josh Mugler and I found a couple pages of Latin Garshuni (#Latin language written in #Syriac script). You can see the first two words ܒܝܪܓܝܢܡ ܒܐܬܡ = Virginem Beatam.
Pesh: ܘܛܠܝܐ ܛܠܐ ܗܘܐ܂
But in 1 Samuel 1:24(-25) the OG preserves a much larger reading: καὶ τὸ παιδάριον μετ᾿ αὐτῶν. καὶ προσήγαγον ἐνώπιον Κυρίου, καὶ ἔσφαξεν ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ τὴν θυσίαν, ἣν ἐποίει ἐξ ἡμερῶν εἰς ἡμέρας τῷ Κυρίῳ, καὶ προσήγαγε τὸ παιδάριον ("and the child was with them. And they approached before the Lord, and his father slaughtered the sacrifice which he was making from tine to time to the Lord, and he brought forward the child.")
A New (Double Palimpsest) Witness to the Old #Syriac Gospels (Vat. iber. 4, ff. 1 & 5) | New Testament Studies | Cambridge Core
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/new-double-palimpsest-witness-to-the-old-syriac-gospels-vat-iber-4-ff-1-5/0DBE3923810C204EB39118267EB41614
"Vat. iber. 4...contains on 2 of its folios the Syriac Gospel text as the lowest layer...within a double palimpsest. Comparison with known Syriac versions...shows that the text...is particularly akin to the Curetonianus (Syc). On palaeographic grounds, the original Gospel manuscript can be dated to the first half of the 6th century."
