International Syriac Language Project Ljubljana, Slovenia. July 2007
Terry
Turner
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2008
Vol. 11, No. 1
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv11n1crfallaturner
Terry Falla and Beryl Turner
International Syriac Language Project Ljubljana, Slovenia. July 2007
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol11/HV11N1CRFallaTurner.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 11
issue 1
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
Linguistics
Lexicography
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[1] The
annual meeting of the International Syriac Language Project
(ISLP) was recently held at the XIXth Congress of IOSOT
(International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament)
in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where a number of the participants were
also involved in the Bible of Edessa meetings and
presentations.
[2] The
meetings and sessions were all held in the superbly appointed
Faculty of Law Building. The organizers and the IOSOT
president, Prof. Dr. Jože Krašovec, are to be
congratulated on a splendidly well organized and resourced
conference. Such was the efficiency that there was even a
conference staff member present for the duration of every
presentation and meeting to ensure that all needs were met.
Conference delegates were generously treated to a number of
musical entertainments and receptions in the city, including a
welcome by the Prime Minister of Slovenia, Mayor of Ljubljana,
and other dignitaries, and a thrilling rendition of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, performed under the stars in
the city square.
[3] The ISLP
held its business meeting on the morning of Monday 16 July, and
a dinner for any involved with Syriac and lexicography that
evening. Papers were delivered and discussed in two sessions,
on the Tuesday and Thursday, with Wednesday given to
sightseeing. The next meetings will be at the Symposium
Syriacum in Granada 2008, and the IOSOT congress in Helsinki
2010.
[4] The
following papers were given, and will be published as
peer-reviewed essays in a volume edited by Bas ter Haar Romeny
and Kristian Heal in the series Foundations for Syriac
Lexicography, part of the ISLP series Perspectives on
Syriac Linguistics published by Gorgias Press.
Janet Dyk, “The Hebrew and Syriac
Cognate Verbs sin, yod, mem and semkath, waw, mim in the
Books of Kings: Similarities and Differences”
David G.K. Taylor and Kristian S. Heal,
“Towards an Electronic Corpus of Syriac
Texts”
Deryle Lonsdale, “A Computational
Perspective on Syriac Corpus Development and
Annotation”
Michael Sokoloff, “The Translation
and Updating of C. Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum:
Progress Report”
Regina Hunziker-Rodewald, “On
Polysemy and Homonymy”
Beryl Turner, “Towards a New Syriac
Dictionary: Lexical Reconsideration of the Term
“kay” in the Peshitta Bible, Old Syriac Gospels,
and Harklean Text”
Reinier De Blois, “Wine to Gladden
the Heart of Man: How to discover the meaning of different
terms for wine”
Percy van Keulen, “Feminine Nominal
Endings in Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac: Derivation or
Inflection?”
Wido van Peursen and Dirk Bakker,
“Lemmatization and Grammatical Categorisation: The case
of “haymen” in Classical Syriac”
Terry C. Falla, “Towards a New
Syriac Dictionary: Lexical Reconsideration of the Particle
“kadh” in Classical Syriac”
Andreas Juckel, “Comparative
features in a future lexicon of the Syriac New
Testament”
1. Janet Dyk, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
The Hebrew and Syriac Cognate Verbs sin, yod, mem and
semkath, waw, mim in the Books of Kings: Similarities and
Differences
[5] In a
joint effort of the Peshitta Institute of Leiden and the
Werkgroep Informatica of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, an
electronic database has been developed in which the Masoretic
text and the Peshitta of the Books of Kings have been analyzed
from morpheme level up through a clause-level synopsis. On the
basis of the synopsis, sentence constituents are matched,
providing the basis for matching phrases within clauses, and
for matching words within phrases. One of the products is an
electronic translation concordance which provides the
translation correspondences occurring within Kings. It should
be stressed that the item that occurs at a specific point in a
particular text is not necessarily a lexicon-based translation;
rather, it is a “correspondence” of that item. In
this manner, both similarities and differences are brought to
light.
[6] In
Peshitta Kings the Syriac verb semkath-waw-mim is
found as the rendering of the Hebrew verb sin-yod-mem
in nearly half of the occurrences. These verbs, so similar in
sound, shape and meaning do not overlap entirely. In an attempt
to explain the observed data, the valence patterns of the
Hebrew verb are compared with those of the Syriac verb. Both
systematic tendencies and individual deviances from these are
presented.
2. David G.K. Taylor, University of Oxford, and
Kristian S. Heal, Brigham Young University
Towards an Electronic Corpus of Syriac Texts
[7] The
desirability of an electronic corpus of Syriac texts has long
been recognized (most recently in Lucas Van Rompay’s
January 2007 Hugoye article). Several localized and
limited steps have been made in this direction, most
significantly with the Peshitta, and as part of the
Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon project. However, no coordinated
and large scale effort has yet been attempted. This paper
reports on a joint initiative by Oxford University and Brigham
Young University to create a comprehensive electronic corpus of
Syriac texts. We outline our plans for building the corpus,
including our methodological approach. We describe the work
that has been completed thus far, giving details of the 2.5
million word corpus that we have already assembled. The heart
of our current initiative is the task of preparing a
concordance to the complete works of Ephrem. The presentation
will conclude with a discussion of the status of this
particular project.
3. Deryle Lonsdale, Brigham Young University
A Computational Perspective on Syriac Corpus Development
and Annotation
[8] This
paper discusses current efforts to develop the computational
infrastructure for collecting, analyzing, annotating, and
deploying large-scale lexical and textual resources for the
Syriac language.
[9] Since
Syriac is a Semitic language, its morphological structure is
complicated and multifaceted. We discuss our efforts to develop
a morphological processor for Syriac word forms and compare the
result to previous efforts by others. The presentation mentions
development of morphology rules, encoding of lexical items, and
generation of analysis hypotheses. Of particular interest is
the treatment of clitics and diacritics.
[10]
Lexical information for the morphological engine relies on an
XML encoding of useful entries from dictionary resources for
Syriac. We describe how we follow current best practices for
lexical content markup, and how this information serves as a
crucial resource for linguistic processing.
[11] The
text corpus situated at the centre of this effort is based on
Ephrem's writings and has been introduced elsewhere. In this
presentation, though, we discuss our choice for encoding and
marking up the content of the text, and give examples of how
interested scholars will be able to benefit from the final
product of our efforts.
[12] We
also sketch our approach for annotating the corpus,
particularly for part-of-speech information and morphological
substructure. A state-of-the-art tagger is presented, and we
discuss its use of salient features (including results from
morphological parsing) for machine learning. An active learning
approach allows us to maximize human annotator cost.
[13]
Finally, we discuss issues about user interface tools, data
visualization, and other questions about deployment of the
corpus and related lexical data to developers and to end
users.
4. Michael Sokoloff, Bar Ilan University, Ramat
Gan
The Translation and Updating of C. Brockelmann’s
Lexicon Syriacum: Progress Report (July 2007)
[14]
Since my report at the Philadelphia SBL Meeting, much progress
has been accomplished and the completion of the project is now
in sight:
Approximately 95% of the primary references in
LS (ca. 86,000) have now been checked in the
original sources. A large number of errors was found in the
original references and most of these have now been
corrected. A residue of errors that could not be located has
been marked as “n. fnd.” [= not found].
Complete or partial citations of the cited texts have
been added to the dictionary for a great majority of the
references. As a result of this, a great number of
multivalent Latin glosses in the original have now been
clarified.
The dictionary database has been completed and refined by
the programmer employed on the project. A demonstration of it
will be given during this presentation.
The speaker intends to begin working on the updating of
the etymologies this summer and hopes to complete this phase
of the project in 2008.
5. Regina Hunziker-Rodewald, University of
Switzerland
On Polysemy and Homonymy
[15]
Lexicographers of the Hebrew Bible are faced with the challenge
of semantically categorizing a growing number of lemmas as
homonyms and as hapax legomena. In doing so, roots need to be
split up, which leads to some lexicons — e.g., HALOT and
DCH – being flooded with so-called “new
words”. This tendency may well be counteracted by using
comparative etymology and by thus tracing polysemy. The
presentation will exemplify how the Swiss team, working on
KAHAL (a revision of HALAT), is proceeding with the task of
reducing the number of homonymous roots.
6. Beryl Turner, Whitley College, University of
Melbourne
Towards a New Syriac Dictionary: Lexical Reconsideration of
the Term “kay” in the Peshitta Bible, Old Syriac
Gospels, and Harklean Text
[16] Our
best comprehensive Classical Syriac dictionaries are more than
a century old. Inevitably, their lexicalization of words is
often partial or outdated in its taxonomy, parts of speech, and
syntactic and semantic analysis. Thus today’s reader of
Classical Syriac often encounters in a text a word or syntagm
with a function and/or meaning that is not cited in Syriac
lexica, or if it is, is either misleading or generalized to the
extent that it is difficult to know whether it is applicable to
the instantiation in question.
[17] This
paper examines the particle kay in its contexts in the
Peshitta Bible, Old Syriac Gospels and the Harklean text, and
in relation to the Greek underlying it. It will be seen that
grammatical classifications given to this term do not
adequately define the quite distinctive ways in which it
functions in the text. A new proposal will be offered as to how
to define the term, and a lexical entry is presented that will
appear in the third volume of the lexical work A Key to the
Peshitta Gospels, and form a basis for its reconsideration
in other early Classical Syriac literature and subsequent
inclusion in a future comprehensive Syriac-English lexicon.
7. Reinier De Blois, United Bible Societies
Wine to Gladden the Heart of Man: How to discover the
meaning of different terms for wine
[18] Most
modern lexicographers agree that the meaning of a lexical entry
should be described in the form of a definition rather than a
gloss or a set of glosses. Writing definitions, however, is an
art in itself. What many lexicographers forget is that
definitions should be formulated in a way that enables the user
to compare the meanings of related words in such a way that
s/he will be able to detect different nuances in meaning among
the different words. This is not easy unless the compiler
follows a clearly outlined methodology. This methodology is
illustrated in this paper with the help of examples from the
Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. It focuses on the
different terms for wine in the Hebrew Old Testament, and shows
how this methodology helps both the dictionary compiler and its
user to get a clear overview of all relevant aspects of the
meaning of each individual word, including its metaphorical
usage. This method provides the compiler with the building
blocks on the basis of which a useful and helpful definition
can be written.
8. Percy van Keulen, Peshitta Institute Leiden
Feminine Nominal Endings in Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac:
Derivation or Inflection?
[19] It
is in the interest of both morphological analysis and
lexicography to have a clear perception of the nature of
feminine endings in the absolute state. Classic dictionaries
and grammars often appear to be inconsistent in their treatment
of substantives with feminine endings. Still, on the basis of a
strict distinction between derivational and inflectional
endings a consistent approach seems possible.
9. Wido van Peursen and Dirk Bakker, Peshitta
Institute Leiden
Lemmatization and Grammatical Categorisation: The case of
“haymen” in Classical Syriac
[20]
Decisions concerning grammatical categorization have a
considerable impact on the lexicographer’s work. An
example is the treatment of haymen in Syriac grammars
and dictionaries: Is it a Payel (Payne Smith), a Pael (Muraoka)
or a Haphel (Costaz) of the verb >MN? Or is it a
denominative verb (Duval), or a Hifil borrowed from Hebrew
(Brockelmann)? And how should we account for the He (rather
than Alaph)? Is it part of the Hebrew loan word (Brockelmann)?
Or is it due to strengthening (Duval) or the preservation of an
ancient form (Nöldeke)? These questions will be addressed
in our paper. It will appear that they are relevant also to
other lexemes, because they touch upon the crucial interaction
of lexicography and grammatical analysis.
10. Terry C. Falla, Whitley College, University of
Melbourne
Towards a New Syriac Dictionary: Lexical Reconsideration of
the Particle “kadh” in Classical Syriac
[21] Our
best comprehensive Classical Syriac dictionaries are more than
a century old. Inevitably, their lexicalization of words is
often partial or outdated in its taxonomy, parts of speech, and
syntactic and semantic analysis. Thus today’s reader of
Classical Syriac often encounters in a text a word or syntagm
with a function and/or meaning that is not cited in Syriac
lexica, or if it is, is either misleading or generalized to the
extent that it is difficult to know whether it is applicable to
the occurrence in question.
[22] By
way of example, this paper examines the grammatical
classification, syntactic functions and meanings of the
particle kadh. It will be argued that, in the Syriac
Gospels alone, the uses and meanings of this term goes beyond
those recorded in existing Syriac lexica. The lexeme is
anaylzed in its Syriac contexts and in relation to the Greek
underlying it.
[23] The
study of this term has two specific aims: its preparation as an
entry for the third volume of the lexical work A Key to the
Peshitta Gospels, and as a basis for its reconsideration
in other early Classical Syriac literature and subsequent
inclusion in a future comprehensive Syriac-English lexicon.
11. Andreas Juckel, Institute for New Testament
Textual Research, Münster
Comparative features in a future lexicon of the Syriac New
Testament
This eleventh paper, while not delivered at the
conference, will be published in the volume with the above
[24] By
their history the Syriac versions of the New Testament (Old
Syriac, Peshitta, Philoxenian, and Harklean) are a corpus of
texts connected by revisional development towards an
increasingly better formal adaptation to the Greek. This
development is set out in comparative editions which cover
(almost) the complete Syriac New Testament. A future lexicon of
the Syriac New Testament (based on the Peshitta) should include
comparative information to set out those translational
properties of the Peshitta in greater detail, which are
“essential to the study of the Peshitta as a translation
of the Greek and as a literary work in its own right” (T.
Falla, A Key to the Peshitta Gospels I, xix). These
details refer to 1. orthography (esp. to proper nouns), 2. to
word formation (esp. to adjectives, adverbs, and to the
translation of Greek compounds), and 3. to semantics (esp. to
the semantic difference existing between the Old
Syriac/Peshitta and the Greek). The purpose of comparison is
not to inscribe the revisional development of the Syriac NT
corpus into the lexicon, but solely to serve the study of the
Peshitta.
[25] To
set out the still idiomatic and non-formalized translation of
the Peshitta as well as the linguistic restrictions of
representing Greek word formation and semantics, the Greek
correspondences and their Harklean calques should be given in a
special “comparative section” (similar to the
section of “Syriac-Greek correspondences” in T.
Falla’s Key). The purpose of the Harklean
calques is to represent the “corrections” to the
Peshitta as they actually occurred in the history of the Syriac
NT corpus. Although these “corrections” refer to
translation technique only and intend the reduction of Syriac
semantics to Greek semantics, they are helpful for
understanding the translational limits, restrictions, and
quality of the Peshitta._______
Notes