Week 1 What is the Middle East? & What is language?
● What is the Middle East?
Some important local, indigenous concepts for sub- regions within this region used
throughout history:
- Levant: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan
- Mesopotamia: modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey and Syria
- Anatolia: majority of modern-day Turkey.
- Arabian Peninsula: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman,
Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
- The Caucasus: Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.
● What is language?
A language is not a script.
A language is not always easily distinguishable from a dialect.
Functionalism: A way that people communicate their thoughts, feelings, and identity in the
social world.
Structuralism: A system of sounds, words, and phrases that recombine in regular, but
infinite, ways.
Diachronic Linguistics: the study of language change over time. Ways to do diachronic
linguistics:
- Genetic Linguistic Approach aka Stammbaumtheory
● The Comparative Method: a method of historical reconstruction which
theoretically allows one to reconstruct a proto-language on the basis of
regular correspondences between its daughter languages.
- Approaches based on Language Contact theory
- Approaches based on historical Typology
It is common among languages across the world which are not related in terms of genetics
or contact to develop in the same way because of some aspect of human social psychology.
Quiz:
In Linguistics, the discipline of syntax is the study of the positions of words in clauses and
the ordering of clauses with respect to one another.
In Linguistics, the discipline of semantics is the study of the meanings of words, and of the
phrases and sentences they make up, insomuch as their meaning is directly derivable from
the meanings of the words.
In Linguistics, the discipline of phonology is the study of the sounds of a language & the
way that languages organizes them relative to one another according to position.
,In Linguistics, the discipline of morphology is the study of the parts of words and the ways
in which they are put together.
In Linguistics, the discipline of pragmatics is the study of the meanings of utterances in
context, especially the goals the speaker/author wishes to achieve in uttering them.
Genetic Linguistics (a.k.a. the "family tree model" or Stammbaumtheorie) is considered
problematic by some for which of the following reasons?
- It has been associated with racist theories in the past.
- It has a hard time explaining "mixed languages" or severe cases of language
contact.
- It presupposes that groups remain more-or-less distinct from one another
over time
The term "Near East" is nowadays used predominantly by which of the following groups?
- some US government offices
- those who work on the pre-Islamic period
- US academics working on the medieval or modern Middle East
Colloquially, people outside the Middle East often interpret the Middle East as roughly
synonymous with the "Islamic World". Which of the following statements presents a valid
reason why some might object to this?
- The Middle East has not always been Muslim.
- It excludes religious minorities living in this region, including Jews, Christians,
and the non-religious.
- The Islamic World is much broader than the countries usually included in the
Middle East.
The abbreviation MENA stands for Middle East and North Africa.
The area in green in the image below is best described in English using the phrase the
Middle East (proper).
, Week 2 The Semitic Language I
● What does a tree in genetic linguistics represent?
The family tree shows the relationship of the language within a family
● What is a proto-language?
a hypothetical lost parent language from which actual languages are derived
● What aspects of the Semitic languages are difficult to capture using only the
family tree model?
Widespread loanwords (esp. from Aramaic or Arabic), loan grammar from contact (with e.g.
Kurdish, or between themselves), sound changes which spread across branches (e.g. the
change of ā > o in Canaanite & Aramaic)
● What are some popular ideas about where the proto-Semitic may have
originated?
Common theory: nexus of Arabia & the Levant
● Where is Mesopotamia?
Iraq and Kuwait. ‘Between the rivers’
● What is the difference between Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian?
Assyrian and Babylonian are two variant forms of the Akkadian language. Assyrian is the
first one to go extinct. → Dit is van google, dus not sure.
● How and when is writing in the Middle East supposed to have started?
City of Uruk, 4th century BC near Bagdad. First ‘writing’ indicating property and transactions.
● How was cuneiform written? Why is it called cuneiform?
Latin cunea means ‘wedge’, made with a pointy stick into clay.
● What was the relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian? How does this
reflect some aspects of social life in Ancient Mesopotamia?
Sumerogram = written as Sumerian, pronounced as Akkadian.
Akkadian eventually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of a large part of
Mesopotamia, however Sumerian continued to be used in the region as a liturgical language
● What are the major structural divisions made when analyzing types of common
writing systems?
Form: cuneiform, hieroglyphic, runeiform/runic, square …
Function: logographic (characters), syllabic (syllables), consonantal (abjad, arabic
bijvoorbeeld), alphabetic (alphabet), mixed (akkadian cuneiform).
Family: (not linguistic language family!) latin alphabet, arabic script, cyrillic etc..
Quiz
● What is the Middle East?
Some important local, indigenous concepts for sub- regions within this region used
throughout history:
- Levant: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan
- Mesopotamia: modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey and Syria
- Anatolia: majority of modern-day Turkey.
- Arabian Peninsula: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman,
Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
- The Caucasus: Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.
● What is language?
A language is not a script.
A language is not always easily distinguishable from a dialect.
Functionalism: A way that people communicate their thoughts, feelings, and identity in the
social world.
Structuralism: A system of sounds, words, and phrases that recombine in regular, but
infinite, ways.
Diachronic Linguistics: the study of language change over time. Ways to do diachronic
linguistics:
- Genetic Linguistic Approach aka Stammbaumtheory
● The Comparative Method: a method of historical reconstruction which
theoretically allows one to reconstruct a proto-language on the basis of
regular correspondences between its daughter languages.
- Approaches based on Language Contact theory
- Approaches based on historical Typology
It is common among languages across the world which are not related in terms of genetics
or contact to develop in the same way because of some aspect of human social psychology.
Quiz:
In Linguistics, the discipline of syntax is the study of the positions of words in clauses and
the ordering of clauses with respect to one another.
In Linguistics, the discipline of semantics is the study of the meanings of words, and of the
phrases and sentences they make up, insomuch as their meaning is directly derivable from
the meanings of the words.
In Linguistics, the discipline of phonology is the study of the sounds of a language & the
way that languages organizes them relative to one another according to position.
,In Linguistics, the discipline of morphology is the study of the parts of words and the ways
in which they are put together.
In Linguistics, the discipline of pragmatics is the study of the meanings of utterances in
context, especially the goals the speaker/author wishes to achieve in uttering them.
Genetic Linguistics (a.k.a. the "family tree model" or Stammbaumtheorie) is considered
problematic by some for which of the following reasons?
- It has been associated with racist theories in the past.
- It has a hard time explaining "mixed languages" or severe cases of language
contact.
- It presupposes that groups remain more-or-less distinct from one another
over time
The term "Near East" is nowadays used predominantly by which of the following groups?
- some US government offices
- those who work on the pre-Islamic period
- US academics working on the medieval or modern Middle East
Colloquially, people outside the Middle East often interpret the Middle East as roughly
synonymous with the "Islamic World". Which of the following statements presents a valid
reason why some might object to this?
- The Middle East has not always been Muslim.
- It excludes religious minorities living in this region, including Jews, Christians,
and the non-religious.
- The Islamic World is much broader than the countries usually included in the
Middle East.
The abbreviation MENA stands for Middle East and North Africa.
The area in green in the image below is best described in English using the phrase the
Middle East (proper).
, Week 2 The Semitic Language I
● What does a tree in genetic linguistics represent?
The family tree shows the relationship of the language within a family
● What is a proto-language?
a hypothetical lost parent language from which actual languages are derived
● What aspects of the Semitic languages are difficult to capture using only the
family tree model?
Widespread loanwords (esp. from Aramaic or Arabic), loan grammar from contact (with e.g.
Kurdish, or between themselves), sound changes which spread across branches (e.g. the
change of ā > o in Canaanite & Aramaic)
● What are some popular ideas about where the proto-Semitic may have
originated?
Common theory: nexus of Arabia & the Levant
● Where is Mesopotamia?
Iraq and Kuwait. ‘Between the rivers’
● What is the difference between Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian?
Assyrian and Babylonian are two variant forms of the Akkadian language. Assyrian is the
first one to go extinct. → Dit is van google, dus not sure.
● How and when is writing in the Middle East supposed to have started?
City of Uruk, 4th century BC near Bagdad. First ‘writing’ indicating property and transactions.
● How was cuneiform written? Why is it called cuneiform?
Latin cunea means ‘wedge’, made with a pointy stick into clay.
● What was the relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian? How does this
reflect some aspects of social life in Ancient Mesopotamia?
Sumerogram = written as Sumerian, pronounced as Akkadian.
Akkadian eventually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of a large part of
Mesopotamia, however Sumerian continued to be used in the region as a liturgical language
● What are the major structural divisions made when analyzing types of common
writing systems?
Form: cuneiform, hieroglyphic, runeiform/runic, square …
Function: logographic (characters), syllabic (syllables), consonantal (abjad, arabic
bijvoorbeeld), alphabetic (alphabet), mixed (akkadian cuneiform).
Family: (not linguistic language family!) latin alphabet, arabic script, cyrillic etc..
Quiz
