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[First posted in AWOL 2 March 2013, updated 28 March 2019]
Sembase: a database project for the study of Semitic roots
In today's world, even people in the same
general discipline, but specialized in different areas, may not
understand each other's work. Nonlinguists working on Middle East
topics, or linguists devoting their time to the study of other language
families, may not have been exposed to the Semitic family of languages
(or Semitic subfamily of Afro-Asiatic). The Semitic languages all share
certain distinctive characteristics. This project is especially
dependent on one of them, the consonantal root system. This very brief
introduction is intended to enable the nonspecialist to more fully
understand Sembase...
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[First posted in AWOL 1 August 2013, updated 25 September 2018]
Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database Project: an international collaborative research project
The Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database project aims
to provide a structured and critical survey of scholarly literature on
the vocabulary of classical Hebrew. As it grows, it will offer an
in-depth resource to complement traditional dictionaries, and also
provide pointers to further research. This international, cooperative
project involves a growing number of research centres with coordination
provided by Leiden.
Read the foundational description of the project (1994); or see the data structure for lexeme entries.
The currently participating centres include the following universities: Bonn, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Oxford, Leiden, Rome.
Steve Kaufman passes along the following news of the Online Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon:
Please advise your readership that I have turned on the lexicon itself, which can be found at http://cal.huc.edu! There are also a few other tools that have been added or will be added shortly.
A brief list of its advantages:
The Advantages of the Online Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon
Welcome to the first complete online academic lexicon of a classical Semitic language and the first dictionary of all of the classical dialects of Aramaic. As an online dictionary, the CAL itself has many advantages over the traditional printed book:
- Entries may be accessed by root, by canonical form, or by the complete form as found in texts. For example, confronted by ובמלכותה the entry can be found by searching for the form as it is, by the root “mlk” or by the lemma “mlkw.” No longer is alphabetization an issue.
- Entries may be accessed by the Aramaic word, by any English word used in the glosses, or by certain semantic fields.
- Citations within entries may be searched.
- Searching may use Roman transliteration, Unicode, Square script (Hebrew) or Syriac keyboards.
- Citations from the database are linked to the full text. Click on a citation in an entry to see it in its original context. From the context, you will find yourself in text browse mode where a click on any other word displays the appropriate lexical entry.
- A complicated entry may also be viewed without justifying citations so as to better study its overall semantic structure.
- Entries display the page numbers where a word is treated in the major previous dialect dictionaries and, more importantly, links to online displays of those digitized pages where allowed by copyright.
- There are no separate pages for abbreviations. Hover with the mouse over an unfamiliar abbreviation and a revealing “tooltip” appears.
- The CAL is live! We are constantly adding texts, adding new words, and improving entries. Active work is in progress improving our textbases and treatments of the less well-known dialects, in particular Mandaic, Samaritan, and Nabataean. All scholarly references to the CAL should thus include the date when the reference was found. We invite corrections from users!
- Although in the sense of the previous paragraph the CAL is not yet “complete,” we have decided to open the lexicon to academe: As of February, 2013, our database consists of over two million parsed words, over 30,000 individual lemmas (and 7,000 cross-references), over 60,000 glosses, and about 20,000 citations.
[This site has been inaccessible for some time. As of today it is back. n.b. NSIA may not work with all browsers. If you have a problem - try with a different tool]
Northwest Semitic Inscription Archive
Welcome to the Northwest Semitic Inscription Archive
Ammonite, Aramaic, Edomite, Hebrew, Moabite, Nabatean, Philistine,
Phoenician, Proto-Canaanite, Proto-Sinaitic, and Punic Inscriptions
Related BibliographyThe Northwest Semitic Inscription Archive (NSIA) has been designed to allow scholars and students access to inscriptions from the above list. The database is continuously updated to include recently published inscriptions. The text of each inscription may be viewed in Aramaic Block Script available at this site.
To use the database, we recommend first clicking on the ""Lryn" Font" button at the top of this page and follow the instructions to install the font onto your computer. For additional information on the font see Tips using the "Tipsheet" button at the top of this page. Once the "Lryn" font is installed, the text of each artifact will display in the Aramaic Block Script...
Inscription bearing artifacts and bibliographic references collected for the Northwest Semitic Inscription Archive are selected according to a rather broad set of parameters. The first goal is to include all Iron Age and Persian Period inscriptions in the Ammonite, Aramaic, Edomite, Hebrew, Moabite, Philistine, Phoenician, Proto-Canaanite, Proto-Sinaitic, and Punic dialects. Geographic provenance for these inscriptions includes the Levant, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Artifact type is limited to inscriptions on durable surfaces; stone, metal, and ceramic. Papyri are not included
Bibliographic references for each inscription are extensive, but not comprehensive. Bibliographic items which provide major discussion of the artifact and its text, comparative study of a group of inscriptions, major exegetical or historical interpretation of each text, or clear photographs/drawings of the artifact/inscription are included. The bibliographic materials are designed to provide significant points of entry into the study of each inscription. However, these bibliographic materials will not provide references to all the nuances of scholarly discussion about each inscription, nuances frequently found included in footnotes, or in tangential remarks within the body of a scholarly work.
©Copyright Dr. Robert Suder 1998
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