Abstract
These ten papers derive from an IOSOT 2022 collaboration with the International Syriac Language Project. The four entries on Hebrew include more theoretical papers on ṭǝʿāmîm (S.L. Pitcher, ‘Law of Continuous Dichotomy’) and worldview and the verbal system (M. Eskhult, ‘Space and Time’), and close textual studies of negated conjunction with או and ו (J. Scheumann, ‘Negated Conjunction’) and of topic-comment with אין (S.H. Levinson, ‘Topic-Comment Constructions with אַיִן’). The three on Syriac digital humanities include a very accessible ‘state of affairs’ in digitisation and tagging (Ch. El-Khaissi, ‘Digitisation, Corpora and POS Tagging’) and more technical descriptions of lexicographic projects (M. Coeckelbergs and W.Th. van Peursen, ‘Using ColibriCore to Identify Translation Divergence’) and their application (J. Wolfe, ‘Syriac Terms for Roman Institutions’). The three on Syriac translation issues address reader-orientation (J.A. Lund, ‘Peshitta Deuteronomy as a Reader-Oriented Translation’), the rendering of grammatical number (L.S. Copley, ‘The Peshitta’s Rendering of the Numeruswechsel in Deuteronomy’) and paratextual features (P. Jutkiewicz, ‘The Syriac Harklean Tradition’). The linguistic organisation SIL Global makes an important contribution in the form of two papers (Pitcher, Levinson) and their FLEx software (El-Khaissi). I was particularly glad to see translation properly addressed as a communicative event between a translator and their audience (Lund)—whilst formally-consistent scholarly glosses (unnatural ‘literal’ or ‘documentary’ translations) may have a place in modern scholarship, they may not have been the priority of ancient translators. The volume is well written and presented, but so diverse that it left me wishing for some investigation of points of contact. If there is a relationship between ṭǝʿāmîm and vocalisation (Pitcher), so surely too between digital grammatical tagging (El-Khaissi), lexical analysis (Wolfe), paratext (Jutkiewicz), detailed source-text analysis (Scheumann, Levinson), and the worldviews and idioms of the source text (Eskhult) and of the intended readers of a translation (Lund, Copley). The increasing analytical power of digital should increase our appreciation of language as an expression of humanity.