Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
256
result(s) for
"Semitic languages Alphabet."
Sort by:
Alphabet scribes in the land of cuneiform : sهepiru professionals in Mesopotamia in the neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods
This book discusses the alphabetic scribes (sهepiru) mentioned in Mesopotamian documents of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods - specifically, of the 6th-5th centuries BCE. The period in question saw a wide diffusion of writing in the Northwest Semitic alphabetic script - mostly in Aramaic - in Mesopotamia; yet, alphabetic texts were normally written in ink on perishable materials and did not survive to be discovered by modern archaeologists. In contrast, cuneiform tablets written on clay have been found in large numbers, and they document different aspects of the alphabetic scribes' activities. This book presents evidence for understanding the Akkadian term sهepiru as a designation for an alphabetic scribe and discusses the functions of these professionals in different administrative and economic spheres. It further considers the question of the ethnic origins of the alphabetic scribes in Mesopotamia, with special attention to the participation of Judeans in Babylonia in this profession. Bloch also provides translations of over 100 cuneiform documents of economic, legal and administrative content.
Book
The Emergence of Alphabetic Scripts
As for Early Alphabetic, A.H. Gardiner (following Flinders Petrie's sense) argued that the intellectual soil that facilitated the invention was the ancient Egyptian writing system, including various Egyptian signs that represented single consonants. It is important to emphasize the usage of Early Alphabetic in the broader Levant during the second millennium BCE. That is, Ugaritic is not the only attested alphabetic writing system in the Levant during the second millennium BCE. Since many of the letters of the alphabet are reflective of Egyptian writing, it seems reasonable to contend that Semites who were familiar with Egyptian writing were the inventors. The inventors were not the Canaanites with the pickaxes in their hands, but rather they were supervisors of those with pickaxes. The earliest inscriptions written in “standardized script” are Phoenician. Thus, it makes good sense to call it “the Phoenician script.”
Book Chapter
The Decipherment of Ancient Near Eastern Languages
This chapter discusses the types of decipherment of ancient Near Eastern languages. The Near Eastern decipherments exemplify the requisites to obtain accurate copies, compile a catalog of the characters and variants, and to observe distributional analysis: word boundaries, prefixes, suffixes, inflections. In popular usage, whenever Egyptologists or Semitic philologists read a hieroglyphic or epigraphic inscription, they are engaged in deciphering. One script in the Northwest Semitic Linear tradition might be said to have undergone decipherment, that now known as Nabataean. The Nabataeans were an Arab people who controlled the trade routes throughout the northern Arabian desert but wrote in Aramaic, using a script not dissimilar to the contemporary Palmyrene, and the Sinaitic inscriptions were first read in Beer 1840. The Greek inscription was easily read, and it was immediately recognized that here lay the key to the mysterious hieroglyphs.
Book Chapter
The influence of orthography in second language phonological acquisition
We provide an exhaustive review of studies in the relatively new domain of research on the influence of orthography on second language (L2) phonological acquisition. While language teachers have long recognized the importance of written input—in addition to spoken input—on learners’ development, until this century there was very little systematic research investigating the relationship between orthography and L2 phonological acquisition. Here, we review studies of the influence of written input on L2 phonological awareness, phoneme perception, the acquisition of phonological processes and syllable structure, and the pronunciation and recognition of words. We elaborate the variables that appear to moderate written input effects: (1) whether or not a novel phonological contrast is systematically represented by the L2 writing system (systematicity); (2) whether some or all of the L2 graphemes are familiar to learners from the L1 (familiarity); (3) for familiar graphemes, whether the native language (L1) and the L2 employ the same grapheme-phoneme correspondences (congruence); and (4) the ability of learners to perceive an auditory contrast that is systematically represented in writing (perceptibility). We conclude by calling for future research on the pedagogical implications of this body of work, which has thus far received very little attention by researchers.
Journal Article
On Linguistic Reviews of Arabic and Bangla: A Comparative Study
This research work sets out to explore the major distinctions between Arabic and Bangla—the languages with unidentical origins. Comparing and analyzing the various features of these two languages requires huge linguistic expertise in the respective fields as it is a most complicated job for anyone to accomplish. Arabic and Bangla are two of the leading languages of the world, specially in terms of their number of speakers and the growing demands. As Arabic and Bangla are from unalike families of languages, they differ a lot in the word class, grammar, pronunciation, usage and so forth. The sentence in Arabic is divided into two types: verbal i.e. V+S+C and nominal i.e. S+C; while the typical Bangla sentence pattern is inflexion-based i.e. S+C+V. Like any other vocalized languages, Bangla has eleven vowels, but Arabic has no such vowels since Arabic alphabet is considered an ‘abjad’ (i.e. ‘أبجدية’ /aːbʤadiah/) meaning a ‘consonantal alphabet’ and so the syllable is often formed without any vowels. Moreover, Arabic writing starts from right to left, whereas Bangla is from left to right. Despite all these differences, Arabic and Bangla have some similarities as well. For instance, they do not have any differences between the upper case and the lower case. Besides, Arabic and Bangla are phonetic and rhotic languages. Nevertheless, there are a few more minor differences between Arabic and Bangla. Hence, this paper is intended to provide the learners, users, as well as teachers of the two languages with some important facts and findings which are often faced in writing, speaking and translating.
Journal Article
Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?
Prior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target words containing one of two consonants that only differed in the presence/absence of a diacritical sign: n and ñ. The prime-target conditions were identity, visually similar, and visually dissimilar. Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition for muñeca-type words (muneca-MUÑECA < museca-MUÑECA), but not for moneda-type words (moñeda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA). Thus, diacritical signs are salient elements that play a special role during the first moments of processing, thus constraining the interplay between the “feature” and “letter” levels in models of visual word recognition.
Journal Article
The early history of the Greek alphabet: new evidence from Eretria and Methone
Inscriptions on new archaeological finds in the Aegean, examined alongside
linguistic evidence relating to Greek and Phrygian vowels, are here used to
explore the origins and spread of the Greek alphabet. The ‘invention’ of
vowels happened just once, with all of the various Greek, Phrygian and
Italic alphabets ultimately deriving from this single moment. The idea
spread rapidly, from an absence of writing in the ninth century BC to casual
usage, including jokes, by 725 BC. The port of Methone in the northern
Aegean emerges as a probable candidate for the site of origin. A place where
Greeks and Phoenicians did business together, with international networks;
was this where Semitic, Greek and Phrygian letters first coalesced?
Journal Article
Multiple dimensions of affix spelling complexity: analyzing the performance of children with dyslexia and typically developing controls
This study examined affix letter spelling among 6th grade Hebrew-speaking children with dyslexia compared with chronologically age-matched and reading level-matched controls. As different languages are characterized by multiple dimensions of affix spelling complexity, we specifically targeted the following unique dimensions relevant to Hebrew: (i) affix envelope transparency; (ii) affix letter prevalence; (iii) internal morpho-phonological competition; (iv) overtness of the phonological-orthographic link; and (v) phono-morpho-orthographic consistency. The research instrument was a spelling task of 244 words containing affix letters, covering all non-root morphological roles, both inflectional and derivational. Results show that for both frequent and infrequent words, 6th graders with dyslexia perform similarly to reading age-matched controls when spelling involves morphological competition or when the phonological morphological and orthographic link is inconsistent. In frequent words the similarity in performance between the groups extends to the overt phonology criterion as well. In addition, 6th graders with dyslexia were assisted by affix letter prevalence but not by demarcation of the affix envelope, compared with reading age-matched controls. Regarding these criteria, the discrepancy between regular and irregular affix spelling was different between dyslexic children and non-dyslexic controls. These findings indicate that morphological knowledge in dyslexia is not a unified system, and while some morpho-orthographic regularities are acquired more easily, other morpho-orthographic regularities are quite challenging.
Journal Article