Session on Syriac Lexicography, International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature Groningen, The Netherlands July 25-28, 2004.
Ilaria
Ramelli
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2004
Vol. 7, No. 2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv7n2crramelli
Ilaria Ramelli
Session on Syriac Lexicography, International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature Groningen, The Netherlands July 25-28, 2004.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol7/HV7N2CRRamelli.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 7
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Syriac Bible
Lexicography
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[1] The
program of the International Syriac Language Project (ISLP)
held during the 2004 SBL International Meeting in Groningen
took place on July 27, 2004 and was characterized by important
contributions in the field of Syriac linguistics and
lexicography. The morning session was chaired by Wido van
Peursen of Leiden University; the afternoon session was chaired
by Peter Williams of the University of Aberdeen.
Index of Paper Abstracts
George Kiraz, "Lexica and Grammar in the
Syriac Tradition."
Peter Williams, "The Semantics of the
Epistles of the Peshitta: The Case of
alpha-privatives."
A.D. Forbes, "Distributionally-Inferred
Word- and Form-Classes in the Hebrew Lexicon."
Terry Falla, "International Syriac
Language Project (ISLP) Report: Aims, Publications, and
Projects."
Janet W. Dyk, "Considerations of Form and
Function in the Treatment of the Passive
Participle."
Andreas Juckel, "Towards an Analytical
Concordance of the Harklean Version"
Michael Sokoloff, "An English Translation
and Revised Edition of C. Brockelmann's Lexicon
Syriacum."
Wido van Peursen and Terry Falla, "The
Particles gyr and dyn in Classical Syriac: Syntactic and
Semantic Aspects"
Lexica and Grammar in the Syriac Tradition
George A. Kiraz, Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
[2] The
first paper of the morning session was delivered by George A.
Kiraz (Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute) and dealt with
Lexica and Grammar in the Late Syriac Tradition. It
offered a selected but detailed survey of the history of Syriac
lexicography and grammar, in which particular attention was
paid to three works written by Syriac lexicographers and
philologists of the nineteenth century: Touma Oddo's
Syriac-Syriac lexicon, Awgen Manna's Syriac-Arabic lexicon, and
Clemis Joseph David's grammar, and the most extensive one
written after that by Bar Hebraeus. Many examples were given of
the dependence of David's work on Arabic grammatical criteria
and of its normative approach to the language. The aim of the
paper was also to see whether and how the methodologies used in
such early works can be employed in modern Syriac
lexicography.
The Semantics of the Epistles of the Peshitta:
The Case of alpha-privatives
Peter A. Williams, University of Aberdeen
[3] Peter A.
Williams, of the University of Aberdeen, spoke about The
Semantics of the Epistles of the Peshitta: The Case of
alpha-privatives. He showed how some aspects of the meaning
of Syriac words can be inferred by text-internal bases, also in
the light of a diachronic study of the language and of
translation techniques from Greek, a synthetical language, to
Syriac, a more analytical one. The example most closely
considered was that of the various Syriac renderings of Greek
alpha-privatives in the Peshitta translation of the New
Testament Epistles: some of such words are transliterated in
Syriac, others are translated with a negative form (negative
particle + adjective or noun etc.), or with a positive one;
sometimes it is absolutely unpredictable whether a negative or
a positive pattern will be used. Particular problems arise in
the case of Greek double negatives, given the necessity of
avoiding two negative particles in Syriac, and of 'negative +
positive(s)' sequences which generally give rise to word order
disturbances in Syriac (positive[s] + negative at the end),
where the negative particle must be placed in the last syntagm,
so that it becomes impossible to refer it to the other terms of
the series. From such considerations, it is evident that
translation literature played a formative role in Syriac
semantics.
Distributionally-Inferred Word- and Form-Classes
in the Hebrew Lexicon
A.D. Forbes, University of California, Berkeley
[4] A.D.
Forbes, of the University of California, Berkeley, presented a
paper on Distributionally-Inferred Word- and Form-Classes in
the Hebrew Lexicon. He illustrated how to infer word- and
form- classes in the masoretic text of the Bible on the basis
of geometrical and hierarchical techniques from statistical
pattern recognition. In particular he showed the importance of
word categories or classes, and investigated which of them can
be appropriate, how they ought to be assigned, what
complications arise in the case of Biblical Hebrew (where we
face orthographical variation, agglutination, and missing
punctuation), how computational systems can help to infer a
taxonomy, and how to derive word classes from word contexts and
form classes from form contexts. Several dendrograms, plots and
ideographical schemata helped much to clarify the exposition.
As the author observed, the resulting groupings of words and
forms are rather satisfactory, but also exhibit some oddities
that need to be either explained away or eliminated. Since it
is necessary to derive insights from limited data that cannot
be increased, the suggestion and the resolution has been to
implement ways of treating and intrepreting these data.
International Syriac Language Project (ISLP)
Report: Aims, Publications, and Projects
Terry Falla, University of Melbourne
[5] The last
paper delivered in the morning was a short communication by
Terry Falla, from the University of Melbourne: International
Syriac Language Project (ISLP) Report: Aims, Publications, and
Projects. It presented the present and future work of the
ISLP, which coordinated the first full day session on Syriac
lexicography at the 2003 SBL International Meeting in
Cambridge. Among many other things, the scholar observed that
much Syriac literature has not yet been lexicalized and that
plenty of work is still to be done, e.g. the preparation of a
Syriac-English lexicon, a Syriac New Testament thesaurus, etc.
Of course, nowadays many tasks can be achieved thanks to the
new digital and computing tools that linguists and
lexicographers can employ. Volumes on Syriac lexicography and
related matters will be published by Gorgias Press, as well as
the papers presented at the meeting sessions, and important
studies have been announced: they will be written by Sebastian
Brock, George Kiraz, Terry Falla, etc. The volumes will belong
to a specific series.
Considerations of Form and Function in the
Treatment of the Passive Participle
Janet W. Dyk, Vrije University of Amsterdam
[6] In the
afternoon session, Janet W. Dyk (Vrije University of Amsterdam)
expounded some Considerations of Form and Function in the
Treatment of the Passive Participle. Attention was focused
on the classification of the participles as verbal forms: the
author showed that their character of verbs, attributes, nouns,
or even adverbs, usually depends on the contexts in which they
are found: if they govern elements (i.e., complements)
verbally, they are verbs, either subordinate, if alone, or main
verbs, if joined to the form "to be", etc. Thus, the question
arose where to put them in the construction of a lexicon: the
scholar suggested that they ought to be set under their
respective verbs, and, if they are placed as separate entries,
in any case there should be the indication of the verbs they
belong to, so that the link may not be missed.
Towards an Analytical Concordance of the Harklean
Version
Andreas Juckel, Institute of New Testament Textual
Research
[7] The
second paper of the afternoon was delivered by Andreas Juckel,
of the Institute of New Testament Textual Research: Towards
an Analytical Concordance of the Harklean Version. It dealt
with the latest Syriac version of the New Testament-more an
adaptation than a translation-prepared by Thomas of Harqel,
Syriac-Orthodox bishop of Mabbug, in A.D. 615-616. The main
characteristic of this translation is that it disregards the
rules of Syriac and prefers a 'mirror translation' of the Greek
text; this makes it particularly useful for those who concern
themselves with textual criticism of the Greek New Testament,
thanks to the possibility of a retroversion too. Recent
scolarship could even reconstruct the Greek NT manuscript(s)
used for this translation, which, together with the existence
of reliable Harklean editions and the consistency of lexical
and translational features in it, induces the preparation of an
analytical concordance of this version. The paper also
illustrated the cultural context in which the Harklean version
arose, its fortune among the Miaphysites, and how it employed
the Greek versions of Origen's Hexapla in a kind of comparative
translation, and offered many examples of translations from
Thomas' work, including hapax legomena, transliterations of
Greek words, the various renderings of Greek compounds, and the
development of transliterations of proper Greek names from
Thomas to the Massora and later documents.
An English Translation and Revised Edition of C.
Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum
Michael Sokoloff, of the Bar Ilan University
[8] Michael
Sokoloff, of the Bar Ilan University (Ramat Gan, Israel),
illustrated the enormous and precious work that he is
preparing: An English Translation and Revised Edition of C.
Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum. Brockelmann, an Arabist who
worked really very much, and at a rather high level indeed,
published the first edition of his lexicon (Edinburgh-Berlin
1895) when he was 27, and the second edition (Halle 1928) is
still used, in absence of better tools, together with the
Dictionnaire syriaque-français by L. Costaz
(Beirut 1963: it is also a Syriac-English and Syriac-Arabic
dictionary). Prof. Sokoloff expounded the main intentions of
his project:
1. To translate the dictionary from Latin into English
(there were some English glosses in the first edition and some
German ones in the second).
2. To update the etymologies, making corrections when
Brockelmann made mistakes, and filling the gaps (e.g.,
loanwords cited from Akkadian that are either incorrect or
non-existent, considering that when Brockelmann was working no
Akkadian dictionary was available; for the Persian loanwords,
Brockelmann did not consider the Middle Persian dialects; the
various Jewish Aramaic dialects are not distinguished; no
cognates from Jewish Babylonian Aramaic or the middle Eastern
dialects are mentioned, etc.).
3 &4. To correct and update the references to text
editions and secondary literature, also revising the
abbreviations system.
5. To reorder the dictionary entries in strict alphabetical
order, while in Brockelmann's lexicon they are not always
listed in that way; moreover, the most useful Index
Latino-Syriacum and Index analyticus, both present
in Brockelmann's first edition, disappeared in the second
one.
Brockelmann's work is regarded to be the most authoritative
and accurate dictionary of Syriac: its translated and revised
edition will be extremely useful for all those who deal with
Semitic languages, Aramaic studies, and Eastern
Christianity.
The Particles gyr and dyn in Classical Syriac:
Syntactic and Semantic Aspects
Wido van Peursen, Peshitta Institute, Leiden and Terry
Falla, University of Melbourne
[9] The last
paper, presented by Wido van Peursen (Peshitta Institute,
Leiden University) and Terry Falla, dealt with The Particles
gyr and dyn in Classical Syriac: Syntactic and Semantic
Aspects. The first problem tackled was that of the
classification of gyr and dyn as parts of the
speech: rather than seeing them as adverbs or conjunctions
since they occur together with true conjunctions, the authors
prefer to consider them as 'connective particles'. From the
syntactical point of view, van Peursen demonstrated that the
position of gyr and dyn in a clause can be
described more precisely than simply "after the first word": in
fact, they are often found after two or more initial words too.
It is better to state that they usually occur after the first
syntactical 'atom', though there are some exceptions
(gyr and dyn found even inside an atom). It
is opportune to notice that other elements too, such as the
enclitic pronouns or l- + suffix, tend to assume the
second position inside the clause, and when these elements
occur all together at the beginning of a phrase, they appear in
the following order: enclitic pronoun, l- + suffix,
gyr/dyn. Sometimes the two connective particles are placed
immediately after the conjunction, like in Greek ei
gar and ei de.
Just the connection to Greek gar and de
often lead to the erroneous assumption that gyr and
dyn are equivalent of the first two also from the
semantic and functional point of view, as shown by Falla on the
basis of a systematical synopsis of the Greek and Syriac
couples of particles in the Gospel and the Pastoral Epistles.
It results that gar and de are not always
translated respectively by gyr and dyn, and,
on the other hand, gyr and dyn do not always
translate gar or de. For instance, in the
Peshitta Gospels gyr translates de, to be
sure, but also kai, oun, alla,
gar, mentoi, plĂȘn,
hoti, te, etc. Conversely, in the Peshitta
Epistles to Timothy and Titus, Greek de is rendered by
dyn, but also by w, gyr, etc., or
even has no correnspondence at all in the Peshitta Pastoral
Epistles. The Peshitta translators seem to have been well aware
of the various semantic values of gyr and
dyn; furthermore, the translations appear different in
the single parts of the Peshitta version. Gyr can
assume at least the following meanings: so, because, so that,
then, for, you see, well, indeed, certainly; for example;
dyn can assume at least the following ones, marking
the beginning of a new sentence: but, and, so, that is,
nevertheless, and yet, however.
[10] The
ISLP has begun to produce very good fruits; all those
interested in Syriac topics will hope that it continues to do
this and to develop its plans and achieve its objectives-which
seems very likely indeed.