Books in the Languages of the Ancient Near East series

Provides a comprehensive overview of Middle Egyptian and systematically illustrates its grammatical features. Includes exercises at the end of each chapter, along with a sign list and a hieroglyphic dictionary.

The system that any language uses to express evaluations, judgments, estimations, and non-real situations tends to be complicated and poorly understood, and this has certainly been the case, historically, for Akkadian. In this study, Nathan Wasserman presents the fruit of 15 years of study of the epistemic modal system of Old Babylonian, which represents one of the better-known and best-documented periods of the Akkadian language. As Wasserman notes, the interplay of philology, linguistics, and psychology that are involved in understanding any modal system make coming to conclusions a difficult enterprise. And though many questions remain unanswered, in this clearly organized and presented monograph, he guides the reader through a study of each modal word/particle, its etymology, syntax, and usage, on the basis of an examination of most of the Old Babylonian examples published thus far. He thus arrives at a general view of epistemic modality in Old Babylonian. Wasserman's monograph is a work that will add significantly to our understanding of Old Babylonian language and the interpretation of texts and will become the benchmark for further study of verbal modality in Akkadian and other Semitic languages.

In this magnum opus, N. J. C. Kouwenberg presents a thoroughgoing, modern analysis of the Akkadian verbal system, taking into account all of the currently available evidence for the language during the course of the long period of its attestation. The book achieves this goal through two strategies: (1) to describe the Akkadian verbal system, as comprehensively as the data permit; and (2) to reconstruct its prehistory on the basis of internal evidence and reconstruction, comparison with cognate languages, and typological evidence. Akkadian has one of the longest documented histories of any language: data from nearly two-and-one-half millennia are available, even if the stream of data is sometimes interrupted and not always as copious as we would like. During the course of this history, numerous developments took place, illustrating how languages change over time and offering parallels for reconstruction of changes that occurred in poorly documented periods. As a result, this book will be of great interest, in the first place, for all students of Akkadian, both the language and the literature that is documented in that language; and in the second place, for all students of language and linguistics who are interested in the study of how languages are shaped, develop, and change during the course of a long history.

A lexicographical index of the linguistic continuum of local dialects spoken in both the Syrian-Levantine (coastal Mediterranean) and Syrian-Mesopotamian (continental-Euphratian) areas during the Bronze Age.

A translation and revision of Josef Tropper's Altathiopisch: Grammatik des Ge'ez mit UEbungstexten und Glossar, providing a comprehensive grammar of Classical Ethiopic, the historical language of Ethiopian Christianity. Uses both the Ethiopian script and transliterations to aid the reader's understanding of the language.