Download or read book Unaccusativity and the Double Object Construction in Sumerian written by J. Cale Johnson and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sumerian, probably the earliest attested language in human history, has no known cognates. Accordingly, many features of Sumerian grammar are still under discussion. Up to now research has focused primarily on questions of Sumerian phonology and morphology. In this present study the author concentrates on syntactic or pragmatic phenomena, especially on the referential properties of the nominal component of certain so-called compound verbs, the unaccusativity contrast, and the possibility of generic quantification in the double object construction.
Download or read book The Class Reunion An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes written by J. Cale Johnson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Class Reunion—An Annotated Translation and Commentary on the Sumerian Dialogue Two Scribes, J. Cale Johnson and Markham J. Geller present a critical edition, translation and commentary on the Sumerian scholastic dialogue otherwise known as Two Scribes, Streit zweier Schulabsolventen or Dialogue 1. The two protagonists, the Professor and the Bureaucrat, each ridicule their opponent in alternating speeches, while at the same time scoring points based on their detailed knowledge of Sumerian lexical and literary traditions. But they also represent the two social roles into which nearly all graduates of the Old Babylonian Tablet House typically gained entrance. So the dialogue also reflects on larger themes such as professional identity and the nature of scholastic activity in Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800–1600 BCE).
Download or read book The Comparable Body Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian Egyptian and Greco Roman Medicine written by John Z Wee and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.
Download or read book From the 21st Century B C to the 21st Century A D written by Steven J. Garfinkle and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.). The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.
Download or read book Visualizing the invisible with the human body written by J. Cale Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.
Download or read book The Fabric of Cities written by Natalie N. May and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fabric of Cities presents an interdisciplinary collection of articles on urbanism in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, which focuses on the social dimension of cities' topographical features. The contributions of this book offer investigations of neighbourhoods, city gates, streets, temples and palaces drawing on textual and archaeological sources as well as art. The topics treated in this work encompass the diverse functions of public and marginal spaces in Mesopotamian cities and Rome, the role of agency in the development of Babylonian neighbourhoods, the relationship between public and private in Assyrian palaces, the connection between political strategies and temple building in Sumerian literary texts, and the communicative uses of language in Classical Greek texts to talk about urban space.
Download or read book In the Wake of the Compendia written by J. Cale Johnson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.
Download or read book Agency in Ancient Writing written by Joshua Englehardt and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through the lens of agency, contributors successfully rethink the nature of ancient texts. In so doing they ably demonstrate that when a new theoretical orientation is applied to a taken-for-granted category of data it invigorates both the data and our understanding of the past." —Marcia-Anne Dobres, University of Main Individual agents are frequently evident in early writing and notational systems, yet these systems have rarely been subjected to the concept of agency as it is traceable in archeology. Agency in Ancient Writing addresses this oversight, allowing archeologists to identify and discuss real, observable actors and actions in the archaeological record. Embracing myriad ways in which agency can be interpreted, ancient writing systems from Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, China, and Greece are examined from a textual perspective as both archaeological objects and nascent historical documents. This allows for distinction among intentions, consequences, meanings, and motivations, increasing understanding and aiding interpretation of the subjectivity of social actors. Chapters focusing on acts of writing and public recitation overlap with those addressing the materiality of texts, interweaving archaeology, epigraphy, and the study of visual symbol systems. Agency in Ancient Writing leads to a more thorough and meaningful discussion of agency as an archaeological concept and will be of interest to anyone interested in ancient texts, including archaeologists, historians, linguists, epigraphers, and art historians, as well as scholars studying agency and structuration theory.
Download or read book Ea s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story written by Martin Worthington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark. The volume argues that Ea used a ‘bitextual’ message: one which can be understood in different ways that sound the same. His message thus emerges as an ambivalent oracle in the tradition of ‘folktale prophecy’. The argument is supported by interlocking investigations of lexicography, divination, diet, figurines, social history, and religion. There are also extended discussions of Babylonian word play and ancient literary interpretation. Besides arguing for Ea’s duplicity, the book explores its implications – for narrative sophistication in Gilgamesh, for audiences and performance of the poem, and for the relation of the Gilgamesh Flood story to the versions in Atra-hasīs, the Hellenistic historian Berossos, and the Biblical Book of Genesis. Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story will interest Assyriologists, Hebrew Bible scholars and Classicists, but also students and researchers in all areas concerned with Gilgamesh, word-play, oracles, and traditions about the Flood.
Download or read book The Grammar of Perspective written by Christopher Woods and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-05-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The so-called Sumerian conjugation prefixes are the most poorly understood and perplexing elements of Sumerian verbal morphology. Approaching the problem from a functional-typological perspective and basing the analysis upon semantics, Professor Woods argues that these elements, in their primary function, constitute a system of grammatical voice, in which the active voice is set against the middle voice. The latter is represented by heavy and light markers that differ with respect to focus and emphasis. As a system of grammatical voice, the conjugation prefixes provided Sumerian speakers with a linguistic means of altering the perspective from which events may be viewed, giving speakers a series of options for better approximating in language the infinitely graded spectrum of human conceptualization and experience. "Woods is to be commended for establishing a new precedent for analyzing Sumerian grammar which will hopefully become a model for future studies of the language." Paul Delnero, Johns Hopkins University
Download or read book Wiener Zeitschrift f r die Kunde des Morgenlandes written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Introduction to the Grammar of Sumerian written by Gábor Zólyomi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook provides an introduction to the grammar of Sumerian, one of the oldest documented languages in the world. It not only synthesizes the results of recent scholarship but introduces original insights on many important questions. The book is designed to appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including those with no prior background in Sumerian or cuneiform writing.It is written for undergraduate students and structured for a semester-long course: the order of the topics is determined by didactic considerations, with the focus on syntactic analysis and evidence. It explains the functioning of Sumerian grammar in 16 lessons, illustrated with more than 500 fully glossed examples. Each lesson ends with a series of tasks; a solution key to selected exercises can be found at the end of the volume. Above all, this is the first Sumerian textbook that introduces and utilizes the online assyriological resources available on the internet. An Introduction to the Grammar of Sumerian has been written on the assumption that after decades of grammatical research it has become possible now to teach a general framework of Sumerian grammar that may function as the basis of further, more intensive and elaborate studies.
Download or read book Coping with Obscurity written by James P. Allen and published by Lockwood Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coping with Obscurity publishes the papers discussed at the Brown University Workshop on Earlier Egyptian grammar in March, 2013. The workshop united ten scholars of differing viewpoints dealing with the central question of how to judge and interpret the grammatical value of the written evidence preserved in texts of the Old and Middle Kingdoms (ca. 2350-1650 BC). The nine papers in the volume present orthographic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic approaches to the data and represent a significant step toward a new, pluralistic understanding of Earlier Egyptian grammar.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 1661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.
Download or read book Assyrian English Assyrian Dictionary written by Simo Parpola and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dictionary contains all the words attested in Assyrian texts from the Neo-Assyrian period. Most of the vocabulary comes from Neo-Assyrian and Standard Akkadian, with some Aramaic and Neo-Babylonian entries. The Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary was the first English-Akkadian dictionary ever published, and the new cuneiform edition features words written in the cuneiform script of the Neo-Assyrian period.
Download or read book The Antisymmetry of Syntax written by Richard S. Kayne and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994-12-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. This book proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. It is standardly assumed that Universal Grammar (UG) allows a given hierarchical representation to be associated with more than one linear order. For example, English and Japanese phrases consisting of a verb and its complement are thought of as symmetrical to one another, differing only in linear order. The Antisymmetry of Syntax proposes a restrictive theory of word order and phrase structure that denies this assumption. According to this theory, phrase structure always completely determines linear order, so that if two phrases differ in linear order, they must also differ in hierarchical structure. More specifically, Richard Kayne shows that asymmetric c-command invariably maps into linear precedence. From this follows, with few further hypotheses, a highly specific theory of word order in UG: that complement positions must always follow their associated head, and that specifiers and adjoined elements must always precede the phrase that they are sister to. A further result is that standard X-bar theory is not a primitive component of UG. Rather, X-bar theory expresses a set of antisymmetric properties of phrase structure. This antisymmetry is inherited from the more basic antisymmetry of linear order. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 25
Download or read book Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language written by Ilya S. Yakubovich and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
