This is a Festschrift for Professor Moshe Piamenta, a great linguist, scholar and researcher, who has contributed to the field of Arabic and Hebrew language and culture for more than six decades. The book is divided into two parts: studies on Arabic and Hebrew, concerning aspects of both the dialects and literary register of Arabic, including lexicological issues. Part II deals with culture as manifest in Jerusalem.Part I: H. Amit Kokhavi, Introducing Register Competence into Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language in Israeli Hebrew-Speaking SchoolsP. Behnstedt, Notes on the Arabic Dialects of Eastern North-Yemen (ilGawf, Sirwah, Marib, Bani Dabyan)J. Blau, Theory and Practice in Middle Arabic: Two Cases of Deficient Self-KnowledgeFurther articles by: A. Borg, O. Jastrow, M. Nevo, Y. Ratzaby, J. Rosenhouse, H. Shehadeh, A. Shivtiel, S. Shrayboym-Shivtiel, and R. TalmonPart II: M. Maoz, Jerusalem in the Modern Era: Political and Social ChangesA. Cohen, A Tale of Two Women: A Jewish Endowment in the 19th Century JerusalemFurther articles by: A. Elad-Bouskila, and R. Sni

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

Journey from the comfort of your home to the most misunderstood place in the world: Israel. Unlike most travelogues, however, your guide is a gay Jew who uses his Arabic to shed light on life in the less-seen parts of this magnificent country. Join him as he shares his gay identity with a questioning teenager, hitchhikes on golf carts in a rural Druze village, and celebrates Shabbat -- all in Arabic. You'll find Matt visiting Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities, using his compassion and sense of humor to delve into the intricacies of one of the most diverse places on the planet.

This book offers sociological and structural descriptions of language varieties used in over 2 dozen Jewish communities around the world, along with synthesizing and theoretical chapters. Language descriptions focus on historical development, contemporary use, regional and social variation, structural features, and Hebrew/Aramaic loanwords. The book covers commonly researched language varieties, like Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as less commonly researched ones, like Judeo-Tat, Jewish Swedish, and Hebraized Amharic in Israel today.

This volume on Jewish language varieties not only accords weight to linguistic and cultural analysis but also to extensive text specimens with both interlinear and idiomatic translation. A comprehensive comparative essay by Aharon Maman introduces the volume. The following book sections are ordered according to the linguistic affiliation of the treated language varieties, in the following order: Semitic (Neo-Aramaic and Arabic), Germanic (Yiddish and English), Romance (Judezmo/Ladino, Haketia, Italian, French, and Provencal), Greek, Iranian (early Persian and Juhuri/Judeo-Tat(i)), as well as Turkic (Crimean-Turkic, Krymchak, Karaim, and other varieties). The main criterion for the inclusion of a language (variety) in this volume was the existence of a sizable amount of religious, literary, scholarly, and other text genres in Hebrew characters produced by Jewish authors. All contributions follow a common structural outline - a cultural introduction followed by a grammatical (and lexical) sketch and then text specimens with glosses. Several indices complete the volume. Beyond its obvious function as a scholarly reference tool, the volume has the potential to emerge as a pedagogical textbook for courses covering one or several Jewish language varieties, as well as courses in general linguistics and in languages in contact.

Much of the insight in the field of Arabic linguistics has for a long time remained unknown to linguists outside the field. Regrettably, Arabic data rarely feature in the formulation of theories and analytical tools in modern linguistics. This situation is unfavourable to both sides. The Arabist, once an outrider, has almost become a non-member of the mainstream linguistics community. Consequently, linguistics itself has been deprived of a wealth of data from one of the world's major languages. However, it is reassuring to witness advances being made to integrate into mainstream linguistics the visions and debates of specialists in Arabic. Building on this fruitful endeavour, this book presents thought-provoking, new articles, especially written for this collection by leading scholars from both sides. The authors discuss topics in historical, social and spatial dialectology focusing on Arabic data investigated within modern analytical frameworks.

The languages of Western Asia belong to a variety of language families, including Indo-European, Kartvelian, Semitic, and Turkic, but share numerous features on account of being in areal contact over many centuries. This volume presents descriptions of the modern languages, contributed by leading specialists, and evaluates similarities across the languages that may have arisen by areal contact. It begins with an introductory chapter presenting an overview of the various genetic groupings in the region and summarizing some of the significant features and issues relating to language contact. In the core of the volume the presentation of the languages is divided into five contact areas, which include (i) eastern Anatolia and northwestern Iran, (ii) northern Iraq, (iii) western Iran, (iv) the Caspian region and south Azerbaijan, and (v) the Caucasian rim and southern Black Sea coast. Each section contains chapters devoted to the languages of the area preceded by an introductory section that highlights significant contact phenomena. The volume is rounded off by an appendix with basic lexical items across a selection of the languages. The handbook features contributions by Erik Anonby, Denise Bailey, Christiane Bulut, David Erschler, Geoffrey Haig, Geoffrey Khan, Rene Lacroix, Parvin Mahmoudveysi, Hrach Martirosyan, Ludwig Paul, Stephan Procházka, Laurentia Schreiber, Don Stilo, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Christina van der Wal Anonby.

Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction. This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary. The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.

The handbook The Semitic Languages offers a comprehensive reference tool for Semitic Linguistics in its broad sense. It is not restricted to comparative Grammar, although it covers also comparative aspects, including classification. By comprising a chapter on typology and sections with sociolinguistic focus and language contact, the conception of the book aims at a rather complete, unbiased description of the state of the art in Semitics. Articles on individual languages and dialects give basic facts as location, numbers of speakers, scripts, numbers of extant texts and their nature, attestation where appropriate, and salient features of the grammar and lexicon of the respective variety. The handbook is the most comprehensive treatment of the Semitic language family since many decades.

Each number is the catalogue of a specific school or college of the University.