This handbook provides a comprehensive account of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, exploring both their structures and features and their function and use in society. The first part of the volume provides background and general information relating to Ethiopian languages, including their demographic distribution and classification, language policy, scripts and writing, and language endangerment. Subsequent parts are dedicated to the four major language families in Ethiopia - Cushitic, Ethiosemitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic - and contain studies of individual languages, with an initial introductory overview chapter in each part. Both major and less-documented languages are included, ranging from Amharic and Oromo to Zay, Gawwada, and Yemsa. The final part explores languages that are outside of those four families, namely Ethiopian Sign Language, Ethiopian English, and Arabic. With its international team of senior researchers and junior scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian Languages will appeal to anyone interested in the languages of the region and in African linguistics more broadly.

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

"The Lord confused the language of all the earth," so the Tower of Babel story in the Hebrew Bible's book of Genesis tells us to explain why the world's people communicate in countless languages while previously they all spoke only one. This book argues that the biblical confusion reallyhappened in the ancient Near East, not in speech, however, but in writing. It examines the millennia-long history of writing in the region and shows a radical change from the third and second millennia to the first millennium BC.Before "Babel" any intellectual who wrote did so as a participant in a cosmopolitan tradition with its roots in Babylonia, its language, and its cuneiform script. After "Babel" scribes from all over the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, used a profusion of vernacular languages and scripts toexpress themselves. Yet they did so in dialogue with the Babylonian cuneiform tradition still maintained by the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires that controlled their world, oftentimes as acts of resistance, aware of cosmopolitan ideas and motifs but subverting them. In order toframe the rich intellectual history of this region in the ancient past Before and after Babel describes and analyzes the Babylonian cosmopolitan system, how ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other vernacular systems interacted with it in multiple and intricate ways, and their consequences.

A Companion to Assyria is a collection of original essays on ancient Assyria written by key international scholars. These new scholarly contributions have substantially reshaped contemporary understanding of society and life in this ancient civilization. The only detailed up-to-date introduction providing a scholarly overview of ancient Assyria in English within the last fifty years Original essays written and edited by a team of respected Assyriology scholars from around the world An in-depth exploration of Assyrian society and life, including the latest thought on cities, art, religion, literature, economy, and technology, and political and military history

In Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic Ambjörn Sjörs investigates the grammar of standard negation in a wide selection of Semitic languages. The bulk of the investigation consists of a detailed analysis of negative constructions and is based on a first-hand examination of the examples in context. The main issues that are investigated in the book relate to the historical change of the expression of verbal negation in Semitic and the reconstruction of the genealogical relationship of negative constructions. It shows how negation is constantly renewed from the reanalysis of emphatic negative constructions, and how structural asymmetries between negative constructions and the corresponding affirmative constructions arise from the linguistically conservative nature of negative vis-à-vis affirmative clauses.

Linguistic Studies in Phoenician: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham honors the late Professor J. Brian Peckham, a scholar who has been instrumental in furthering the cause of Phoenician studies over the past decades. His passion made him an exceptional teacher, and his research on Phoenician studies resulted in his Phoenicia: Episodes and Anecdotes from the Ancient Mediterranean (Eisenbrauns, 2014), which he finished just prior to his passing in September 2008. This collection of studies dedicated to his memory is aimed at advancing our understanding of the grammatical and historical features of the Phoenician language, a favorite topic that Professor Peckham rigorously studied and taught. The first set of studies concentrates on linguistic features of Phoenician qua Phoenician. They include investigations of phonology and morphology, as well as linguistic approaches to syntax and text-level pragmatics. The second set of studies seeks to situate aspects of the Phoenician language typologically or within comparative, etymological, and historical Semitics. The result is a group of studies covering topics ranging from case endings, negation, pronominal usage, and phonology to dialectology, etymologies, and text linguistics. Given the use of Phoenician throughout the Mediterranean littoral, this volume contains something of interest for numerous areas of investigation, including comparative Semitics, Anatolian, early Mediterranean, and even Hebrew and biblical studies.

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’.

The Verb in Archaic Biblical Poetry: A Discursive, Typological, and Historical Investigation of the Tense System offers a comprehensive analysis of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discursive properties of the verb in the corpus of archaic" biblical poetry (The Song of Moses, Song of the Sea, Song of Deborah, Song of David, Blessing of Jacob, Oracles of Balaam, Blessing of Moses, and Song of Hannah). The approach integrates modern research on tense, aspect, and modality, while also addressing the complicated philological issues in these texts. The study presents discursive analysis of biblical poetic texts, systemic description of each text’s tense system, and reconstruction of the archaic verbal tenses as attested in part of the corpus.

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.