This is a Festschrift offered by friends and colleagues to papyrologist and ancient historian Peter van Minnen. The volume contains the edition or re-edition of 52 papyri and ostraca, dating from... Show moreThis is a Festschrift offered by friends and colleagues to papyrologist and ancient historian Peter van Minnen. The volume contains the edition or re-edition of 52 papyri and ostraca, dating from between the third century BCE and the eighth century CE. Their subjects vary from Demosthenes to the delivery of camels in early Islamic Egypt, and their provenances stretch from the Eastern to the Western Desert, and from the Egyptian Nile valley to Qasr Ibrim in northern Nubia. All texts are published with transcription, translation, commentary and colour photographs. In addition, there are five studies, reflecting the honorand’s wide-ranging interests. Show less
Research into the phrasing, structure, and nature from the point of view of legal history, as well as the social and religious background of temple oaths from the Ptolemaic period, supplemented... Show moreResearch into the phrasing, structure, and nature from the point of view of legal history, as well as the social and religious background of temple oaths from the Ptolemaic period, supplemented with 21 unpublished texts written in demotic and Greek. Chapter 1. Introduction: Meaning and terminology of the oath in Ancient Egypt; Chapter 2. Juridical oaths from the Old Kingdom through the Ptolemaic period: an overview (ca. 2600-30 B.C.); Chapter 3. The format of temple oaths: a study of their clauses, components and legal contents; Chapter 4. Swearing a temple oath: the procedure; Chapter 5. Unpublished texts. A selection of demotic temple oaths in the Turin Egyptian Museum and Greek temple oaths from various collections. Show less
The article discusses the development of the Proto-Indo-European sequences *-eum and *-eh2m. The former produced *-ēm, allegedly through loss of *-u- with compensatory lengthening of the preceding... Show moreThe article discusses the development of the Proto-Indo-European sequences *-eum and *-eh2m. The former produced *-ēm, allegedly through loss of *-u- with compensatory lengthening of the preceding *-e- ("Stang’s law"), while *-eh2m allegedly produced *-ām within the proto-language ("extended Stang’s law"). The evidence for both claims is scrutinized, with special emphasis on the acc.sg. and acc.pl. endings of the ā-stems in Indo-Iranian and Baltic and the Proto-Indo-European paradigm of the word for ‘cow’. It is concluded that "extended Stang’s law" cannot be maintained and that "Stang’s law" is probably incorrect, too. Alternative explanations for the attested forms are given. Show less
The relation between prosodic realization, syntactic structure, interpretation and focus has caused much debate in the literature. This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the... Show moreThe relation between prosodic realization, syntactic structure, interpretation and focus has caused much debate in the literature. This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the semantic and prosodic properties of object foci in Greek, employing theoretical and experimental tools. The main research question is: do preverbal object foci in Greek differ from their postverbal counterparts?. In the first part of the thesis, Greek preverbal object foci are compared to their postverbal counterparts with respect to exhaustivity, contrast and discourse topichood. For this purpose, a number of tests are applied to the Greek data. On the basis of the results of the tests, it is argued that preverbal and postverbal object foci do not differ with respect to exhaustivity and contrast. It is also argued that the two differ with respect to discourse topichood. It is shown that Greek preverbal object foci are actually fronted dis course topics. In the second part of the thesis, a production and two perception experiments were carried out to investigate the phonetic properties of preverbal and postverbal object foci in Greek. Moreover, a production and a perception experiment were carried out to investigate the phonetic realization of contrast in Greek. Show less
This is the first study that connects Septuagint research, mainly the domain of theologians, to insights from Translation Studies. Of the different approaches in TS I consider especially historical... Show moreThis is the first study that connects Septuagint research, mainly the domain of theologians, to insights from Translation Studies. Of the different approaches in TS I consider especially historical TS and the linguistic (or early) TS relevant for the study of the Septuagint. From a survey of views of language and translation in Antiquity it appears that the same differences of opinion existed among Greeks, Romans, Jews and Egyptians. The 'frontlines' between views of language and translation by no means coincided with religious borders. That there would exist 'a Jewish view of translation' prescribing literalness, as is commonly believed, is evidently mistaken. This myth in fact harks back to the anti-Jewish propaganda by the church father Jerome (Hieronymus). Many 'modern' insights in language and translation were common knowledge in Antiquity, albeit less systematic and in a different terminological garb. The chapters 4-6 consist of an analysis of the transformations (or 'shifts', changes in form or content that necessarily or intentionally occur in the process of translation). I analyzed the LXX translations of Genesis 2, Isaiah 1 and Proverbs 6. Before ascribing 'deviations' to the translator's ideology or to a different Hebrew Vorlage, one should of course first exclude the possibility that the deviation arose from translational factors. Every transformation has a cause, and by categorizing the rationales behind the transformations we can trace the translational hierarchy that guided the translator(s), consciously or unconsciously. The conclusions show that both Septuagint Studies and Translation Studies greatly profit from this cross-fertilization. Show less
