Friday, January 20, 2006

YALE UNIVERSITY has a number of visiting professors and lecturers in Jewish studies this year. The Jewish Ledger profiles them (Moshe Bar-Asher, Elitzur Bar-Asher, Renée Levine Melammed, and Uri Melammed) and their work and classes. Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, etc. are well represented. I'm especially impressed with Elitzur Bar-Asher's Aramaic course:
I’m teaching a class at Yale entitled Aramaic Survey. In the course, we are covering 3000 years of Aramaic. We begin with the royal inscriptions, and then text from the Achaeamenid period (including Biblical Aramaic). We study Nabataean and Palmyrene Aramaic in the first semester, and in the second semester we will read texts from Qumaran, Syriac, Babylonian Aramaic (the language of the Babylonaian Talmud), Palestinian Aramaic (the language of the Palestinian Talmud) n and we’ll end with dialects of Aramaic which are still spoken. Covering 3000 years of a language give the opportunity to deal with many questions of Historical linguistics and to trace the development of some interesting linguistic features.

Good stuff.

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