At the end of the course, the student must demonstrate the following abilities:
None.
At the beginning, the lessons will mainly be lectures, although the active participation of the students and their involvement in the discussion of the proposed topics will be encouraged from the start. The reading of the Aramaic texts from Elephantine will have a seminar structure.
The exam consists of an oral test in which the candidate will answer two to three questions related to the program and translate a few lines, with the support of a glossary, from one of the texts studied during the course. The evaluation will take into account the level of acquired skills, the use of the appropriate terminology, and the ability to grasp the essential points of the issues discussed during the course.The exam can be held in Italian, English, French, or German at the student's choice.
The material will be provided by the teacher.
As reference texts (not mandatory), one can refer to the concise compendium A.D. Rubin, A Brief Introduction to the Semitic Languages, Gorgias Press 2010 for Semitic languages, and to T. Muraoka, Introduction to Egyptian Aramaic, Ugarit-Verlag 2012 for the texts of Elephantine.
With their five thousand years of written attestation, Semitic languages constitute one of the best-documented language families and offer the opportunity to engage with a linguistic and cultural heritage of a chronological and geographical breadth that has few parallels in human history. Today, Arabic is the best-documented and most widespread Semitic language, but many other languages from this family still exist or have existed between Southwestern Asia and North and Eastern Africa. The course is designed as an introduction to comparative Semitic linguistics. It will provide a historical-geographical framework of Semitic languages, their classification, and their writing systems, along with some references to other languages of the Afro-Asiatic family.
Through the reading of short texts, on the one hand, an overview of the individual languages and their peculiarities will be provided; on the other hand, the common grammatical and lexical aspects of the Semitic languages will be addressed.
The last part of the course will be dedicated to the study of Imperial Aramaic (5th-4th century BC), particularly through some texts from the island of Elephantine (Egypt), where a colony of Judaean soldiers of the Achaemenid army was stationed.
Italian.
Students unable to attend are kindly asked to contact the teacher as soon as possible to establish an alternative program according to their interests.
