Search results for ""Undena Publications,U.S.""

The analysis of writing is shown to parallel that of speech. Graphemes-- that is, letter shapes--are analyzed in terms of the physical distinctive features of strokes, minimal pairs, and etic and emic components. Hence, GRAPHEMICS. In the development of Hebrew/Yiddish cursive from the medieval square forms, there is a clear tendency toward maximization of contrasts, elimination of redundancy, and evolution by means of drag chains and push chains; there is also some evidence of gradualness, and documentation of sub-emic change.

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The "dynastic chronicle" here termed the Harab myth (CT XL VI, no, 43) presents a new theme in Mesopotamian mythology, that of succeeding generations of gods who come to power through parricide and live in incest with mother, sister, or both. This copy of the text is Late Babylonian with a mixture of Assyrian and Babylonian forms. Transliteration and translation are followed by an extensive commentry which discusses several motifs germane to the reconstruction and interpretation of the myth. Sources, background and cross-cultural comparisons are also provided. The Harab myth may be briefly described as a "genealogy of cosmic moral."

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The question of whether schwas are inserted or present in underlying representations of C 1 C 2 and C 1 C 2 C 3 verb stems in Berber is examined here in detailThis examination consists of proposing, motivating, and evaluating a number of analyses possible within the generative framework It also considers recent proposals concerning " abstract nessand "concreteness" of underlying representations, and alterna tive orderings of phonological rules. It is concluded that a "total ly concreteanalysis s-i.e with underlying schwas - is superior to other less concrete ones, chief among them the" totally abstract analysis with consonants only. The implications of this conclu sion are discussed and suggestions for further research are made.

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Some scholars, especially Diakonoff, have delineated a number of general Afroasiatic structural features which are present in the Chadic family. Most such comparative work has relied heavily on Hausa, but Hausa viewed alone does not always give an accurate picture of deeper Chadic patternsUsing data from Chadic languages in addition to Hausa we find many specific features of the Chadic verbal system correspond closely to those reconstructible for proto-Afroasiatic. Two such features are (1) use of a subject prefix, and (2alterations of verb stems to indicate aspect.

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An early established tenet of generative phonologists was that the SYSTEMATIC PHONEME should replace the neo Bloomfieldian AUTONOMOUS PHONEME in phonological theory, this being a gratuitous hypostatization frequently making it impossible to state phonological patterning in fully general form. This was early demonstrated by Robert Lees and Morris Halle in the now classical cases of Turkish and Russian devoicing. The present paper argues that for Tiberian Hebrew, ALTHOUGH autonomous phonemic analysis (2) and systematic phonemic analysis (3) clash in a considerably more radical way than do the above cases (4), NEVERTHELESS the distribution of the grapheme dagesh is interpretable only pursuant to the autonomous phonemic analysis (5). A solution is suggested to this apparent paradox (6).

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Investigating the verb la-mut 'to die' in Hebrew, one observes that, depending on the context, it has a secondary meaning ranging from 'want' to ' love'. It will be argued here that the different readings of the verb stem from a regularity in Hebrew according to which some verbs may change their interpretation in a predictable way, depending on their syntactic environment; when followed by a NP, the verb is interpreted as a comment on a situation; where followed by S, no such comment is required. The syntactic arguments for the analysis are based upon the operation of the Noun Phrase Constraint. The semantic arguments assume that a sentence embedded in a NP is a presupposition of the entire sentence. This analysis suggests that some verbs of perception and the like have as one of their semantic features [+/-comment] and some may add such a feature through the process of the semantic reading of the entire utterance .

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The Sam languages are spoken in the Eastern African countries of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia. They include Rendille, Boni and the various dialects of the Somali dialect cluster. The term "Sam" refers to a closely-knit unit of Cushitic languages within the Omo-Tana (formerly called " Somaloid" or Macro-Somali) branch of Lowland East Cushitic. The Sam-speaking people originate from the Ethiopian Highlands. During the last two millennia, it is claimed here, they took possession of the arid plains of northeastern Kenya, Somalia and eastern Ethiopia. In the present paper an attempt is made at reconstructing aspects of the history of the Sam languages.

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Analysis of the pronunciation of the prefixed particles in Hebrew formal and semi-formal speech shows that deviations from the norms are of significance only in the minority of the forms, espe cially in the rare environments. The findings are explained by a markedness theory which incorporates frequency and naturalness of rules and conditions from phonetic, morphophonemic, and morpho syntactic points of view. The pronunciation of the prefixed particles may serve as a parameter for linguistic registers.

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The tablets recovered in Mozan during the sixth season of excavations in 1990 represent the northernmost find to date of well stratified cuneiform texts for the third millennium. They are accounts of people listed by name, profession and sometimes provenienceThe guage in which the texts are written is plausibly Old Akkadian, and so is a majority of personal names, but several names may be explained as Hurrian The date is that of the later portion of the Sargonic period. Besides providing a complete philological treatment of the texts, this fascicle briefly describes the archaeological context - a stratigraphically well defined deposit within a sizeable stone building; it also provides a brief report on the work of the sixth season of excavations.

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The present study adopts a generative theoretical approach and analyzes a number of phonological and morphological rules in Akkadian, especially: a- EPENTHESIS, i - ADD , VOWEL DELE TION, VOWEL SHORTENING , VOWEL LENGTHENING , and FEM ININE SUFFIX SELECTION. Where necessary, the rules are motivated, described in detail, and reformulated. It is shown that all these rules are subordinated to constraints on Akkadian syllable structure. The Akkadian syllable may have no more than three segments (with the possible ex ception of a word-final syllable having a long vowel), and phonological rules eliminate overweight syllables, or produce well- formed ones. Sumerian influence seems to have engendered VOWEL DELETION in Akkadian, but the constraints on syllable structure curtail its applica tion. Related issues such as stress, orthography, and Assyrian VOWEL HARMONY are also treated.

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An important discovery of two large Neo-Assyrian sculptures was made in 1982 at Tell Ajaja on the Khabur River: a lamassu with the inscribed name of Mus?zib Ninurta, and a winged bull. Mus?zib-Ninurta is known as the governor of the city of Saddikanni in 820 B.C., and he is certainly the same as the individual mentioned on the lamassu of Tell Ajaja. Preliminary excavations undertaken at the site in 1982 have confirmed that the two sculptures were in situ at the entrance to a room in a monumental building.

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The canonically anomalous shape of Syriac verb ekah 'to find' is shown to result from a convergence of diachronic pressures on an intersection of phonological weak spots and morphosyntactic imbalance. The effect of the changes is a trade-off of morphosyntactic defectiveness for moderate phonological anomaly. The developmental hypothesis adopted underscores the importance both of multiple factors in diachronic change and of homeostasis in linguistic systems.

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This book (published in 2019) presents the very particular story of an archaeological site in Syria during the recent eight years of war. The ancient city of Urkesh, today Tell Mozan, in northeastern Syria, became a centre of activities that developed around the archaeological site, a strong and unexpected synergy between a variety of communities and social groups. In strong contrast with the destructive violence of war and the intentional and perverted iconoclastic fury of ISIS, Urkesh has emerged as a source of hope and a reason for pride for the people who live in the area. It became a symbol of the new sensitivity that archaeology as a discipline is developing--a sensitivity towards the value of the land as a shared element betweenthe ancients and the people who live there today. Colour illustrations throughout.

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A descriptive catalogue of 49 ancient Near Eastern terracottas, 23 stone artifacts, and 86 ancient Mesopotamian and Sassanian seals in the Babylonian Collection of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology of the Univerity of California, Berkeley. 15 pages of black and white plates containing 96 individual images.

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Iranian society came under the domination of tribal elites during the first part of the Safavid era. This book seeks to show how Iranian elites differed from other contemporary elites, to assess the place of the Iranian system in the world pattern of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to contribute toward the understanding of a non-European society on its own terms and according to its own realities.

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Essays on Egyptology by G.R. Hughes, D. Schmandt-Besserat, K. Butzer, W.K. Simpson, H.A. Liebowitz, T.A. Wertime, L. Mesnick Gallery and C. Aldred.

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This study collects, under section II, the Hurrian personal names preserved in the Old Babylonian tablets uncovered at Tell al-Rimah. A smaller list ( Pi,1) gives names which cannot be analyzed by the author. The third section (III) presents a list of Hurrian elements involved in making up the names. While it is stressed that names of Hurrian coinage do not necessarily reflect Hurrian ethnicity, an introduction: gives statistics on the names of Hurrian derivation; 2. discusses the stratification of Hurrians within Rimah's society and 3. speaks to the ethnic' concentration of Hurrians during the various phases of Old Babylonian Rimah.

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One of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements of the world, Adana is a town in modern Turkey, on the Cilicia Plain. Of the 132 cylinder seals presented here, many types are still poorly known. This new material extends the known series of peripheral cylinder seals. A revised sphragistics terminology is tested on this material, in accordance with the terminology now in use.

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Namburbi is the title of a group of typical Babylonian incantations, used to "undo" or avert portended evil. Consisting of both rituals and prayers, they provide a response to the observed events taken by the Mesopotamians to be signs of future happenings; thus they are the practical correlate of the "omen texts," which list such portents and their significance. The fascicle by Caplice includes a long introduction, which explains the nature of the texts and their ritual Sitz im Leben, and the translation, with notes, of 14 representative texts, ranging from a Ritual for the Evil of a Snake to a Ritual to Secure Brisk Trade.

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One speaks of extrinsic ordering when the order of application of two rules must be specifically indicated and does not follow from a general principle. In Arabic the survival of a long vowel in a syllable made closed by a contraction may be a case of such ordering, though it may also be interpreted as an instrinsically ordered sequel of 'nonproductive -- operative' rules. On the other hand, the incongruent agreement of numerals with the underlying singulars of cooccuring plural nouns is definitely extrinsically ordered.

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In the paper the authors hope to account for the aspect marking constructions of modern Hausa by providing detailed historical explanations of their origin and development, beginning with morphological forms and syntactic patterns reconstructed for Proto-Hausa. The description accounts for the asymmetry in certain paradigms, the lack of parallelism between affirmative and negative paradigms in certain aspects, and some of the differences between contemporary dialects. The hypotheses about Hausa history are supported by reliable comparative data from other Chadic languages.

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This paper has two purposes: first, to present the facts of the system of kinship terminology of Angas; and second, to propose a formalism for representing such facts within linguistic descriptions. The analysis presented is purely formal, with no discussion of the cultural or func tional expression of the system in behavior. A number of anthropological concepts are found to be useful in the description; of particular note are the principle of reciprocity, and the necessity of carrying out kinship investigations from the point of view of both male and female Ego. It is argued that the proposed formalism is superior to other such systems which have been proposed because of its capacity for ready in tegration into current linguistic theory because of format and rule type. A few concluding remarks are made regarding suggested application of the proposed formalism to matters of semantic change and reconstruction.

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The complexity of some complex sentence types in Urban Moroccan Arabic is studied here and compared with some other dialects of Arabic The types relative, direct object, subject and (nominal) predicate clauses, and all expansions of NP, and seem to be related both in structure and use (or deletion of subordinating conjunctions. The variety of sub-classes that exists for the four types, as as their conditioning, may indicate the complexity involved. Some processes of distinction between structures seem to be developing still, and it is interesting to compare them with earlier stages of Arabic ( Classical and Middle Arabic).

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Relativization in Modern Israeli Hebrew is discussed from a number of perspectives. First, it is shown that when the resumptive (anaphoric) pronoun in Hebrew relativization is attracted to the position adjacent to the head noun, the relative subordinator she may be deleted. In other words, the pronoun may assume the perceptual function of relative subordinator. Next, it is shown that the resumptive pronoun itself functions as a perceptual simplifier in relativization, so that when the order of constituents in the relative clause is one which may create ambiguity or difficulty in assigning grammatical relations, the presence of an otherwise optional resumptive pronoun becomes obligatory. This is shown for both subject and object relativization. Further, it is shown that the option of deleting the resumptive pronoun in Hebrew relativization decreases when one goes down the scale of arguments: subject accusative > simple prepositional objects > complex prepositional objects. This hierarchy is discussed in the context of syntactic perceptual complexity . Finally, a number of new developments in the marking of relative clauses / pronouns is discussed, particularly the ascendence of the use of WH -pronouns as relative subordinators, and the suppletive effect this process has on the use of the subordinator she- and the resunptive pronouns.

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Linguistic phenomena as manifested in the case of a Hebrew-speaking aphasic are discussed in this monograph. The patient's linguistic performance included: (1)writing down forms which deviated from the standard orthography, but which corresponded remarkably well with the types of underlying phonological repre sentation that a linguist might independently propose; (2) verbal behavior which involved the frequently random transfer of verbs from one class to another; (3) restructuring of surface forms to form "novelroots; (4) errors involving the complex rule of spirantization. Attention is paid to the implications for linguistic research in general, and for Semitic in particular.

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The morphology and morphophonemics of the verb in Rendille are treated; of simple stems consisting of a bare , and of derived stems consisting of a root plus an extension affix. Suffix extensions-which may be reflexive-middle causative, agentive-are dealt with in some detailbrief mention is made of prefix extensions, in particular the reduplicative. Some notes are included on verbal noun forms. Morphophonemic alternations in the verb are examined. Attention is drawn to the primacy of a 2-Consonant constraint in Rendille and various rule conspiracies designed to prevent violations of this; and rule conspiracies; phonotactically constrained consonant metathesis and a peeking rule'.

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The evidence for Assyrians in Babylonia during the Chaldean and Achaemenian periods. is presented in section II below. This evidence consists mainly of onomastic material which is thoroughly analyzed. The prosopography of the Assyrians consists of 116 individuals who lived in Babylonia between 626/5 and 404/3 (or 349/8) B.C. The analysis of the onomastic material is also of linguistic interest as it reveals that several Assyrian dialectal features were still current after the fall of the Assyrian empire.

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This work offers its users a convenient form by which to locate dated texts from the Old Babylonian Period which have been published in the Archives Royales de Mari I-XVIII as well as in various periodicals. It includes other texts dated to the same period which were parts of the Chagar Bazar, Tell Taya and Rimah archives. Pre-dating the era of widespread use of spreadsheets, the work takes the form of loose, unbound large-format printed sheets, contained within a paper wallet. Also within the wallet is a 20-page booklet containing an introduction to the work. From the introductory text: "On individual sheets of 22 x 35.5 cm, dated materials have been entered into spaces of approximately 1 sq. cm. Each one of these squares represents one day of one month of a particular year or eponym."

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Tell Qraya is predominantly a late-fourth millennium B.C. archaeological site astride a natural conglomerate rock promontory on the west bank of the Euphrates River, just five kilometers north of the large second millennium B.C. city of Tell Asharah (ancient Terqa). In 1981 systematic excavation of a major square and test trenches uncovered three Protoliterate building phases. This excavation report offers a comprehensive record of the stratigraphy, features such as burials, walls, heaths, and fire pits, and all categories of artifacts such as pottery, other ceramic objects, chipped stones, bone tools, stone objects, bitumen objects, and unbaked clay objects. In addition to an abundance of classical Protoliterate material of all kinds, including cylinder and stamp seals, are painted pottery and other atypical findings that may be indicative of inter-cultural contacts rather than being intrusion from an earlier Ubaid period. The excavations at Qraya were undertaken in conjunction with the work being carried out at Terqa, and under the same permit. This was not only because of logistics, but also because the site of Qraya may plausibly be considered as the one from which Terqa took its origin, given their close proximity in space and their neat juxtaposition in time.

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Preliminary soundings were conducted at Tell Mozan in the north-central portion of the Khabur plains in 1984 and 1985. This volume reports on the finds made as well as on various aspects of research goals of the project. The site has proven to be a major urban settlement of the third millennium and early part of the second millennium, with the possibility that it may correspond to ancient Urkish, known to have been a major Hurrian centre in the early periods.

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