Na’ama Pat-El: The Syriac Particle lam

Professor Na’ama Pat-El gives a lecture on the Syriac particle lam, delivered on April 10, 2014 at The University of Texas at Austin:

The Syriac particle LAM has been assumed to be a marker of direct speech by grammarians and linguists. Several scholars has traced its history to an infinitive of the verb to say in Aramaic. In this talk I will take a fresh look at the function of the particle in Syriac texts of various genres and periods and its possible etymology. The results will shock and amaze you, and will serve as a reminder of what happens when one does not read ancient texts carefully.

The lecture is available in mp3 audio format.

Na’ama Pat-El is an Assistant Professor, focusing on Semitic historical linguistics. She is the author of Studies in the Historical Syntax of Aramaic (Gorgias, 2012) and a co-author of Language and Nature: papers presented to John Huehnergard (Oriental Institute, 2012). She has published on language contact and historical syntax.

See also: Na’ama Pat-El, “The Function and Etymology of the Aramaic Particle LM”

Aramaic Lessons – Achaemenid Period

David Taylor (Oriental Institute, Oxford) provides various Achaemenid-Period Aramaic resources, including a skeleton grammar, exercises, Aramaic texts, and dictionaries and vocabularies.

Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary

J. Payne Smith (ed.), A Compendious Syriac Dictionary Founded upon the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith (Oxford: Clarendon 1903) is available online through Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies (Tyndale House).

The Tyndale Archive also includes Gesenius’ 1906 Hebrew and Aramaic dictionary, Wilson’s 1850 Hebrew dictionary, Lane’s 1860 Arabic lexicon, Crum’s Coptic dictionary, and Jastrow’s rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic dictionary.

Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of Targumim, Talmud and Midrashic Literature (1926)

A complete 1926 edition of Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of Targumim, Talmud and Midrashic Literature is available online through Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies (Tyndale House).

The Tyndale Archive also includes Gesenius’ 1906 Hebrew and Aramaic dictionary, Wilson’s 1850 Hebrew dictionary, Lane’s 1860 Arabic lexicon, Payne Smith’s Syriac dictionary, and Crum’s Coptic dictionary.

Ancient Near Eastern Languages.com

Ancient Near Eastern Languages.com (anelanguages.com) provides pdfs of out-of-copyright grammars and textbooks, dictionaries, language fonts, alphabets, and other tools, for the following languages:

Akkadian

Aramaic

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Hebrew – Biblical and Epigraphic

Moabite

Phoenician

Sumerian

Ugaritic

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL) Project

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL)

is a text base of the Aramaic texts in all dialects from the earliest (9th Century BCE) through the 13th Century CE, currently with a database of approximately 2.5 million lexically parsed words, and an associated set of electronic tools for analyzing and manipulating the data, whose ultimate goal is the creation of a complete lexicon of the language. IT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, not a completed dictionary.

The site’s CAL Lexicon Browser allows users to search the database by the initial consonantal letters of a word, which provides a list of possible words. From this users may generate a KWIK, which provides a list of every use of the word in its literary context.