Reflections on Old Nubian Grammar
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6013567 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kerstin Weber, Petra Weschenfelder (0000-0001-6151-5436) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Dotawo A Journal of Nubian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2373-2571 • E-ISSN: 2373-2571 |
| Publisher | California Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5070/d61110041 |
| OpenAlex | W21923603 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 1 |
Recent approaches to the Old Nubian language try to go beyond the analysis of classical biblical texts.Instead they divert their attention to judicial documents to find out more about everyday life in medieval Nubia. 1 The potential of these texts is great, our means to understand them, however, is still quite limited due to wide ignorance of Old Nubian's linguistic structure.Our contribution will analyze the problems in our approaches so far and provide suggestions for a comprehensible and comparable analysis that hopefully proves easier to grasp.Earlier works from Francis Ll.Griffith, 2 Fritz Hintze, 3 or Gerald M. Browne 4 try to provide a comparative analysis based on different texts.Among those works the editions of Browne have the highest impact on our approaches to the texts today.Even though Browne did an impressive job dealing with Old Nubian texts, his work can only be a starting point for the work to come.Yet even as a starting point several issues must be addressed, issues concerning Browne's terminology.First of all, Browne's revelations are scattered around in several different publications with differing content while indices are mostly missing.Even if you find your way through the jungle of publications, Browne changed his terminology for some phenomena or often does not even give an exact definition of his terms.The meaning of these terms is simply not inherent in the terms itself; consider, for example the 'predicative copulative.' 5 Furthermore one term might encompass several different phenomena, as it is the case with the term 'predicative.' 6Especially when new to the field of 1 Cf.for example Ruffini, Medieval Nubia. 2 Griffith, The Nubian Texts of the Christian Period.3 Hintze, "Beobachtungen zur altnubischen Grammatik i & ii." 4 Browne, Introduction to Old Nubian.In the following we will refer to Browne's revised edition Old Nubian Grammar
Grammar · Linguistics · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Computer Science · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |