Download or read book The Neo Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho written by Oz Aloni and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1951, the secluded Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jewish community of Zakho migrated collectively to Israel. It carried with it its unique language, culture and customs, many of which bore resemblance to those found in classical rabbinic literature. Like others in Kurdistan, for example, the Jews of Zakho retained a vibrant tradition of creating and performing songs based on embellishing biblical stories with Aggadic traditions. Despite the recent growth of scholarly interest into Neo-Aramaic communities, however, studies have to this point almost exclusively focused on the linguistic analysis of their critically endangered dialects and little attention has been paid to the sociological, historical and literary analysis of the cultural output of the diverse and isolated Neo-Aramaic communities of Kurdistan. In this innovative book, Oz Aloni seeks to redress this balance. Aloni focuses on three genres of the Zakho community’s oral heritage: the proverb, the enriched biblical narrative and the folktale. Each chapter draws on the author's own fieldwork among members of the Zakho community now living in Jerusalem. He examines the proverb in its performative context, the rewritten biblical narrative of Ruth, Naomi and King David, and a folktale with the unusual theme of magical gender transformation. Insightfully breaking down these examples with analysis drawn from a variety of conceptual fields, Aloni succeeds in his mission to put the speakers of the language and their culture on equal footing with their speech. The Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have kindly supported the publication of this volume

Download or read book The Neo Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho written by Oz Aloni and published by Semitic Languages and Cultures. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1951, the secluded Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jewish community of Zakho migrated collectively to Israel. It carried with it its unique language, culture and customs, many of which bore resemblance to those found in classical rabbinic literature. Like others in Kurdistan, for example, the Jews of Zakho retained a vibrant tradition of creating and performing songs based on embellishing biblical stories with Aggadic traditions. Despite the recent growth of scholarly interest into Neo-Aramaic communities, however, studies have to this point almost exclusively focused on the linguistic analysis of their critically endangered dialects and little attention has been paid to the sociological, historical and literary analysis of the cultural output of the diverse and isolated Neo-Aramaic communities of Kurdistan. In this innovative book, Oz Aloni seeks to redress this balance. Aloni focuses on three genres of the Zakho community's oral heritage: the proverb, the enriched biblical narrative and the folktale. Each chapter draws on the authors' own fieldwork among members of the Zakho community now living in Jerusalem. He examines the proverb in its performative context, the rewritten biblical epic narrative of Ruth, Naomi and King David, and a folktale with the unusual theme of magical gender transformation. Insightfully breaking down these examples with analysis drawn from a variety of conceptual fields, Aloni succeeds in his mission to put the speakers of the language and their culture on equal footing with their speech.

Download or read book A Jewish Neo Aramaic Dictionary written by Yona Sabar and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2002 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dictionary is based on old and recent manuscripts, printed texts, literary Midrashic texts, recorded oral Bible translations, folk literature, and diverse spoken registers. It has an extensive introduction, including a brief history of the Jewish dialects and their relations to older Aramaic, detailed observations on orthography, phonology, morphology, semantics, and other related grammatical features, that will serve the users well. The source for each word is indicated, including context quotations when necessary. A special effort was made to trace the origin of each and every word, be it native (classical and Talmudic Aramaic, Syriac etc.), or a loan word (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, general European). The Dictionary includes an index to all the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic words which have cognates or reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, a very important tool for the history of comparative linguistic studies of Aramaic. The Dictionary will be useful for scholars of Neo-Aramaic as well as classical and Talmudic Aramaic and Syriac, Semitic Languages, Jewish Languages, Languages in Contact, and other Near Eastern Languages in general. It is the first scholarly dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and is intended to be a linguistic monument to the community that spoke it for many centuries until its emigration to Israel.

Download or read book Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo Aramaic written by Geoffrey Khan and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

Download or read book Neo Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq written by Geoffrey Khan and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative anthology showcases the rich and mutually intertwined folklore of three ethno-religious communities from northern Iraq: Aramaic-speaking (‘Syriac’) Christians, Kurdish Muslims and—to a lesser extent—Aramaic-speaking Jews. The first volume contains several introductory chapters on language, folkore motifs and narrative style, followed by samples of glossed texts in each language variety. The second volume is the anthology proper, presenting folklore narratives in several distinct varieties of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic and Northern and Central Kurdish. The stories are accompanied by English translations. The material includes different genres such as folktales, legends, fables and anecdotes, and is organised into seven thematic units. The folkloristic material of these three communities is shared to a large extent. The anthology is, therefore, a testament to the intimate and long-standing relations between these three ethno-religious communities—relations that existed in a multilingual environment centuries before the modern era of nationalism.

Download or read book The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew written by Aaron D. Hornkohl and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-06 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores an underappreciated feature of the standard Tiberian Masoretic tradition of Biblical Hebrew, namely its composite nature. Focusing on cases of dissonance between the tradition’s written (consonantal) and reading (vocalic) components, the study shows that the Tiberian spelling and pronunciation traditions, though related, interdependent, and largely in harmony, at numerous points reflect distinct oral realisations of the biblical text. Where the extant vocalisation differs from the apparently pre-exilic pronunciation presupposed by the written tradition, the former often exhibits conspicuous affinity with post-exilic linguistic conventions as seen in representative Second Temple material, such as the core Late Biblical Hebrew books, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Sira, rabbinic literature, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and contemporary Aramaic and Syriac material. On the one hand, such instances of written-reading disharmony clearly entail a degree of anachronism in the vocalisation of Classical Biblical Hebrew compositions. On the other, since many of the innovative and secondary features in the Tiberian vocalisation tradition are typical of sources from the Second Temple Period and, in some cases, are documented as minority alternatives in even earlier material, the Masoretic reading tradition is justifiably characterised as a linguistic artefact of profound historical depth.

Download or read book Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible written by Daniel J. Crowther and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together papers on topics relating to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We refer to this broadly in the title of the volume as the ‘Masoretic Tradition’. The papers are innovative studies of a range of aspects of this Masoretic tradition at various periods, many of them presenting hitherto unstudied primary sources. They focus on traditions of vocalisation signs and accent signs, traditions of oral reading, traditions of Masoretic notes, as well as Rabbinic and exegetical texts. The contributors include established scholars of the field and early-career researchers.

Download or read book An Introduction to Andalusi Hebrew Metrics written by José Martínez Delgado and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2023-05-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the last two centuries, Hebrew metrics was studied by leading linguists and specialists in medieval Hebrew poetry. Nowadays, it has disappeared from the academic discussion such that it is sometimes even difficult to find scansions or the name of the meter in new editions of poems. This book aims to rectify this gap, helping readers to understand the metric structure of this poetry in order to facilitate the work of editing and cataloguing those samples still in manuscript form for future editors. Delgado presents his view of Andalusi Hebrew metrics, as encountered in medieval manuals of Arabic and Hebrew metrics and scattered notes in the works of Andalusi Hebrew philologists. Whilst twentieth-century scholars spoke about the adaptation of Arabic metrics to Hebrew, he instead approaches these compositions by Andalusi Jews (10th-13th c.) as Arabic metrics written in Hebrew, thus emphasising how Hebrew poetry of the Andalusi Jews can help us to understand the general evolution of Arabic strophic poetry, and its experimental evolution, which is quite unlike classical and strophic Arabic poetry. This method respects the Hebrew vowel system, and does not necessitate alteration of word morphology, leaving the guttural letters quiescent (unless required by metrical license); nor does it necessitate guesses about metres that are not in the classical catalogue. Although the author has not found each and every classical metre from Andalusi Hebrew poetry included in this manual, they are all catalogued, either in case someone finds them in future or because they help us to comprehend the metrical structures that are characteristic of strophic poetry. As such, this monograph will be of great interest to scholars of Hebrew metrics.

Download or read book The Bible in the Bowls written by Daniel James Waller and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-11-28 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic. In a number of cases, the bowls also contain the earliest attestations of biblical verses not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pre-dating the next available evidence by four to five centuries, the bowls are a valuable resource for biblical text critics. By making these valuable witnesses to the Hebrew Bible easily available to scholars, The Bible in the Bowls is designed to facilitate further research by linguists, liturgists, biblical text critics, and students of Jewish magic. It collates and transcribes each biblical verse as it appears in the published bowls, furnishes details of the bowls’ publication, and notes various features of interest. The catalogue is also accompanied by an accessible introduction that briefly introduces the incantation bowls, surveys their deployment of scripture in light of their magical goals, and discusses the orthography of the quotations and what this can tell us about the encounter with the biblical text in late antique Babylonia.

Download or read book Diachronic Variation in the Omani Arabic Vernacular of the Al Aw b District written by Roberta Morano and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this monograph, Roberta Morano re-examines one of the foundational works of the Omani Arabic dialectology field, Carl Reinhardt’s Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in ‘Oman und Zanzibar (1894). This German-authored work was prolific in shaping our knowledge of Omani Arabic during the twentieth century, until the 1980s when more recent linguistic studies on the Arabic varieties spoken in Oman began to appear. Motivated by an urgent need to expand and reinforce our understanding of Omani Arabic, the book provides a linguistic analysis of the Omani vernacular spoken in the al-ʿAwābī district (northern Oman), based on the speech of fifteen informants recruited throughout the area. It also provides a comparative analysis of the new data with that collected by Carl Reinhardt in 1894. This comparison enables the reader to appreciate the extent of diachronic linguistic variation in the region, and also sheds light on the threats that such variation poses to Omani-specific linguistic features. Organised in four chapters, the book presents a sociolinguistic analysis of the Omani linguistic landscape followed by an examination of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the al-ʿAwābī vernacular. Each chapter contains primary data collected by the author in situ compared, when applicable, with Carl Reinhardt’s materials. The appendix includes two sample texts extrapolated from the recordings, fourteen proverbs and one traditional song. This study will be of interest to those working in the fields of Omani Arabic, historical and comparative linguistics, translation and interpretation, or those with an interest in how languages develop over time.

Download or read book Sefer ha Pardes by Jedaiah ha Penini written by David Torollo and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-08-03 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking new work is the first full critical edition and English translation of the Hebrew book Sefer ha-Pardes [The Book of the Orchard], written at the end of the thirteenth century by the Provençal Jewish author Jedaiah ha-Penini. It is purportedly an example of musar: a compilation of wise epigrams and meshalim [parables] that teach moral lessons on different topics, such as the service of God, friendship, the deceitfulness of the world, medicine, logic, music, magic, and poetry. However, it is in reality a compendium of sayings that reveal the author’s personal views and feelings on a variety of religious topics, secular sciences, and their practitioners. David Torollo presents a fluent and illuminating English-Hebrew parallel text based on four sixteenth-century witnesses: three manuscripts and a printed edition. A rigorous study accompanies and contextualises the Hebrew work, exploring Sefer ha-Pardes’s transmission and reception in different places over time; its structure and content; its place in the intellectual environment and literary tradition of Provence; and possible lines of enquiry for future research. This essential new work offers a significant contribution to scholarship in the field of Medieval Hebrew Hispano-Provencal literature.

Download or read book The Jewish Neo Aramaic Dialect of Betanure province of Dihok written by Hezy Mutzafi and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2008 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Betanure, which has hitherto remained unattested, is among the rarest and most seriously endangered varieties of Aramaic spoken at the present time. One of the most archaizing Jewish Neo-Aramaic varieties and a member of the Lishana Deni dialect cluster of northernmost Iraq, the dialect is currently spoken in Israel by no more than three dozen elderly people, of whom only a small minority are pro'cient speakers. The grammatical description of the dialect is synchronic, but it includes etymological and historical comments as well as several paragraphs dealing with diachronic processes. The large and variegated corpus of texts, based on narratives furnished by the last two superb speakers of the dialect, comprises, inter alia, descriptions of the village of Betanure and its history, the fauna and ?ora of the region, agriculture and other occupations of the Jewish villagers, customs and traditions, legends, folktales, anecdotes and amusing stories. The glossary is extensively etymological and offers much comparative data drawn from numerous Neo-Aramaic varieties, apart from recourse to Classical Aramaic lexical data.

Download or read book Hamlet on a Hill written by Martin F. J. Baasten and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is published in honour of Professor Takamitsu Muraoka on the occasion of his retirement from the Chair of Hebrew, Israelite Antiquities and Ugaritic at Leiden University, a date which coincides with the celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday. The laureate is well known for his expertise in the languages of the Bible and cognate studies and this volume includes contributions covering as far as possible the wide field of his interests. Some of his friends and colleagues from all parts of the world are presenting him with this valuable collection of forty-two articles. They include studies on the Greek of the Septuagint; Hebrew (Biblical and Qumran); Aramaic (Old, Offical and Qumran; Syriac and Neo-Aramaic); Canaanite (Amarna, Ugaritic and Phoenician-Punic); Medieval Jewish exegesis and Karaite studies. M.F.J. Baasten and W.Th. van Peursen, two former students of Muraoka at Leiden, have edited the volume.

Download or read book Languages in Jewish Communities Past and Present written by Benjamin Hary and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Studies in Neo Aramaic written by Wolfhart Heinrichs and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Women as Ritual Experts written by Susan Starr Sered and published by Publications of the American Folklore Society. This book was released on 1992 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analyzing the rituals, daily experiences, life-stories, and non-verbal gestures of Jewish women from Kurdistan and Yemen now living in Jerusalem, Sered discloses stategies these women have used to circumvent the patriarchal institutions of Judaism and to develop their own traditions within Torah Judaism.

Download or read book Kurdish Culture and Society written by Lokman I. Meho and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-02-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique, timely, and up-to-date, this volume is the first comprehensive bibliography on Kurdish culture and society. Compiled to help students, educators, researchers, and policy makers find relevant information with ease, the book includes more than 930 items in four major languages--Arabic, English, French, and German. This work covers the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, communication, demography, travel, economy, education, ethnicity, health, journalism, language, literature, migration, music, religion, social structure, urbanization, and women's studies. The volume includes books and book chapters, journal articles, Ph.D. dissertations, conference papers, articles in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and important Web sites. Essays provide an overview of Kurdish society as well as surveys of Kurdish life in Syria, the former Soviet Union, Europe, and Lebanon. An invaluable guide for researchers interested in the Kurds and Kurdistan, this book will aid in the location of information that is highly diverse and scattered. With its focus on a timely subject, this book fills a major gap in the bibliographic literature.