Bardaisan's Book of the Laws of the Countries : a computer-assisted linguistic analysis

Bakker, D. (2011)

Doctoral Thesis

This dissertation presents the results of a computer-assisted linguistic analysis of the __Book of the Laws of the Countries__, a religious prose text, attributed to the 3rd-century theologian Bardaisan, which is one of the earliest representatives of Syriac literature. Using the computational tools and methods that were developed in the Leiden project __Turgama: Computer-Assisted Analysis of the Peshitta and the Targum: Text, Language and Interpretation__ by dr. Wido van Peursen, I have analysed this corpus on different linguistic levels: orthography / morphology, phrase structure, and clause structure. This analysis enables us to gain deeper insight in the peculiarities of the Syriac language of the 3rd century; the same period in which the Hebrew Bible was translated into Syriac, resulting in the so-called Peshitta. As such, the Book of the Laws of the Countries represents a corpus written in __native__ Syriac, to which the translated Syriac of the Peshitta can be compared. This will allow us to attain a better view of the considerations which played a role in the creation process of the Syriac Bible; e.g., the amount to which translation was influenced by interpretation, the two possible meanings of the Syriac word __Turgama__.

• Ancient Texts
• Computational linguistics
• Early Christianity
• Syriac

• All authors: Bakker, D.
• Supervisor: Kooij, A. van der
• Co-supervisor: Peursen, W.T. van
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
• Date: 2011-04-20
• Sponsorship: J.E. Jurriaanse Stichting, Rotterdam.