My “dream” job, just a couple years early

Via Jack Sasson’s Agade list:
YALE UNIVERSITY, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is seeking to fill a full-time appointment as Lector or Senior Lector with responsibility to teach Aramaic, Advanced Syriac, Ugaritic, and Comparative Semitics, beginning July 1, 2010. Competence in further Semitic languages is welcomed. Ph.D. preferred but not required. Interest in [...]

A closer look at definiteness – the uniqueness approach

In languages with the grammatical category of definiteness, the prototypical definite noun phrase is one marked with the definite article. This is usually contrasted with an indefinite article or bare noun phrase such as in example 1:
(1a) I bought the car today.
(1b) I bought a car today.
Explanations for the various uses of the definite article [...]

Definiteness, information structure, and the particle את in BH

In a new series of posts I would like to introduce the research project behind my dissertation. My hope is that in being transparent during the writing process I can receive good feedback beyond my primary readers. The danger of being too transparent, of course, is that someone may borrow some of my ideas. I [...]

One step closer

This summer and fall I have been working on a paper that summarizes much of the linguistic research that forms the background of my dissertation topic. I finally finished and sent the paper off to my advisor yesterday, so if all goes well I can begin working on the actual dissertation proposal here in the [...]

Goings on in the blogosphere

Ed Cook has written a post on the verbal system in BH poetry, a topic I touched on earlier in the summer. His instinct is similar to mine that the semantics of the verbal system are similar in prose and poetry, but this is obscured by the fact that narrative convention “tips” the reader to [...]

(Swine?) Flu 2 – Bekins House 2

Well, both my sons have come down with the flu this past week. Henry is going on day 6 and Jack is into day 2. So far my wife and I have stayed healthy somehow, but I’m not holding my breath. My basic plan of attack has been to keep my mouth a sterile environment [...]

Happy birthday Henry

5 years ago today, my oldest son Henry was born. I still remember sitting in the hospital working on homework while my wife bounced on an exercise ball eating jello and watching Spongebob Squarepants on TV (this was before the doctor broke her water and got things moving).
The passage I was translating was Isaiah 9, [...]

Cuneiform resources

The Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire site is a great resource for introductory material in Assyriology. Besides transliterations and translations of Neo-Assyrian texts, there are good introductions to related subjects as well.
They have just added an excellent introduction to all things cuneiform, Cuneiform Revealed,  including a very helpful intro to the Akkadian language [...]

0 for August

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past month. There are several reasons for my silence, but mostly:
1) I have been having massive writer’s block trying to put together my dissertation proposal. I had a spurt at one point, but then I found another dissertation from 2000 that is most of my idea, so [...]

More evidence of the Kaufman effect?

Duane Smith recently posted a link to an interesting discussion of the order of פ and ע in the acrostics in Lamentations (איכה). The issue is that in the acrostics in chapters 2-4 the פ section precedes ע. The author, Mitchell First, argues that this is because פ actually preceded ע in the alphabet in [...]