Northwest Semitic Inscriptions

The Northwest Semitic branch includes Ugaritic, Aramaic and Canaanite languages, among which Hebrew and Phoenician are the most known languages. Linguistic materials attesting NWS languages started to show up in written in the second millennium B.C.. We shall concentrate in genuine texts from the biblical period, comparing it when necessary to transmitted texts. We will mainly deal with problems of documentation, partial documentation and reaching conclusions about lesser documented languages. We will look at the ways to overcome the temporal and cultural gaps and deal with questions of limnguistic history and the relationship between the attested dialects. Requirements: Introduction to Semitic Linguistics or any Semitic language beginners‘ course.