Gorgias Press
Perspectives on Linguistics and Ancient Languages
This volume publishes the papers presented at the round table on Syriac lexicology and lexicography held at the 13th Symposium Syriacum (Paris, 2022). An international group of scholars approaches this field from several new angles and shows how much remains to be done, from the creation of new lexical databases to the update of previously existing ones and the study of new lexica that have been recently discovered. Section one: Syriac Lexicology and Lexicography. Daniel King discusses aspects of the philosophical lexis found in Jacob of Edessa’s Handbook of Logic. Anna Cherkashina, Yulia Kirilenko, Artyom Badeev and George Kiraz present a new historical dictionary of Syriac, currently in preparation. Section two: Syriac and foreign lexis. Claudia Ciancaglini updates her 2008 study on the contacts between Iranian languages and Syriac. Mara Nicosia discusses the creation of a trilingual dictionary (Syriac, Greek and Arabic) of the technical vocabulary of rhetoric. Margherita Farina studies for the first time the multilingual glosses compiled by the fourteenth-century author Daniel the Annotator. Section three: Syriac and Neo-Aramaic. Hezy Mutzafi offers an in-depth study of two lexical items from the Syriac Book of Medicine, explained with the aid of cognates in NENA dialects. Nicolas Atas investigates for the first time a Syriac-Ṭuroyo glossary written by the Chorepiscopus Aḥo of Sedari (1908–1980). The multifocal approach adopted by the contributions to this volume testifies to the richness of this field, which offers several avenues for further inquiry. The volume is designed for scholars in Syriac, as well as for those interested in the contacts between Syriac and its neighbouring languages from the past and the present, such as Greek, Arabic, Iranian languages and Neo-Aramaic varieties.
The structure of the Book of Numbers and its division into textual units has long been of interest to scholars, and various theories have been put forward based on criteria such as time, location or theme. The present volume offers a syntactic-hierarchical analysis of the Book of Numbers, giving priority to syntax and secondary priority to participants and their roles.
This volume offers papers that emerged from the meeting of the International Syriac Language Project (ISLP) which took place at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in September 2016, and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in August 2017. The ISLP invites research not only into Syriac, but extends its range to all ancient language lexicography. Hence its proceedings enrich the whole field of Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek lexicography. The ISLP especially encourages research into the interfaces between these languages, and hence the current volume contains a number of papers on translation equivalence: Hebrew-Greek, Hebrew-Syriac, and Greek-Syriac. Other philologically focused pieces explore matters relating to textual and manuscript traditions. All of these are preceded in the present volume by an extensive review of the production and achievements of the ISLP to date.
