Rethinking the Origins

We have great news to share! The book “Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins” has just been published. Check out the volume, that gathers papers from world-leading scholars of Egyptian, African, and Semitic languages, on the Eisenbrauns website (Penn State University Press).
https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-64602-212-0.html
Take 30% off with the code NR23 when you order through psupress.org

It's hard to believe, but Rethinking the Origins starts tomorrow! Join us at 5.30 at RI Hall 108 for the organizers' welcome, the introductory speech by James Allen, and the keynote lecture by John Huehnergard!

And today, let's meet our last speaker: Christopher Ehret!
Christopher Ehret is a Distinguished Research Professor at the Department of History at the University of California in Los Angeles. His research interests range from African History to Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Khoesan Historical Linguistics, and he is renowned for his effort to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archaeological record. His published monographs include The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cush*tic Phonology and Vocabulary (1980), Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (1995), A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan (2001). He is also the author of over five dozen articles on Linguistics, Genetics, History of Africa, and Afroasiatic languages. In recent years, Ehret has been working on the reconstruction of the history and evolution of early human kinship systems, on linguistic and genetic correlations (Sarah A. Tishkoff, Floyd A. Reed, F. R. Friedlaender, Christopher Ehret, Alessia Ranciaro, et al., 2009 “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans,”) and on the development of mathematical tools for dating linguistic history (Andrew Kitchen, Christopher Ehret, Shiferew Assefa, and Connie Mulligan, 2009 "Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East,").

Today let us introduce to you our next speaker: Gonzalo Rubio.
Gonzalo Rubio is an Assyriologist, who also works on comparative Semitics. He earned his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University in 1999. He also holds licentiates in Classics and in Semitics from the Complutense University in Madrid. He teaches at the State University of Pennsylvania, where he holds appointments in the Dept. of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies, as well as in Asian Studies and in History. Rubio is also a Senior Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University.
Rubio has published scholarly contributions on Sumerian grammar and literature, early Semitic languages (particularly Eblaite), comparative Semitic linguistics, and various aspects of language contact in the Ancient Near East.
Rubio is the editor of two monograph series: Languages of the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns) and Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (De Gruyter). He also serves as the president of the International Association for Comparative Semitics (IACS).

Lameen Souag is our next speaker. He will be presenting "Restructured or Archaic? The Hunt for Shared Morphological Innovations".
Lameen Souag is the lab's deputy director of the unit Langues et Civilisations a Tradition Orale (LaCiTO) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He received his Ph.D. at School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London (SOAS) in 2010 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on the grammatical effects of contact of two languages of the Sahara. For that purpose, he spent over half a year in the Sahara documenting Korandje and Siwi. He has taught at the SOAS, worked on its Endangered Languages Archive, and been a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the same university. He has authored the monograph Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt): A Study in Linguistic Contact (2014), and has published over 20 research articles on historical linguistics, linguistic contact, syllabification, dative and demonstrative agreement, the subclassification of Songhay, and description of Korandjé, Siwi, and Algerian Arabic.

Our next speaker who will give the paper entitled "Understanding the Egyptian Lexicon with(out) Comparison" is Jean Winand!
Born in 1962, Jean Winand graduated in classical philology and in oriental studies at the University of Liège. He won his PhD in Egyptology in 1989, and then obtained the degree of Agrégé de l’Enseignement supérieur (corresponding to the German Habilitation) in 2002. Jean Winand has been working with the FNRS of Belgium for more than 15 years, before entering the academic staff of the University of Liège in 2003. Professor ordinarius in 2005, he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Letters in 2010, and re-elected in 2012 and 2015. He is also a member of the university board since 2014.
He won the Anneliese-Maier Forschungspreis of the von Humboldt Foundation in 2015, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2017.
The main research areas of Jean Winand are the languages and literature of Ancient Egypt. He has extensively worked on verbal aspect within a theoretical framework that combines lexical semantics and grammar. He also takes an interest in the writing system of Ancient Egypt and in the history of ideas.
He is the author of Etudes de néo-égyptien. I. La Morphologie verbale, 1992; Grammaire Raisonnée de l'Égyptien Classique, 1999 (with Michel Malaise); Temps et aspect en égyptien ancient, 2006; Les Pharaons. Une histoire personnelle, 2017; L’université à la croisée des chemins, 2018.
With Stéphane Polis and Eitan Grossman, he is editor-in-chief of the series Mouton Companions in Ancient Egyptian (Berlin, De Gruyter).

Can you believe that "Rethinking the Origins" takes place in one week? Be sure to join us next weekend for the three days of archaeo-linguistic discussion that have a potential to improve the current conception of the Afroasiatic family.
Send an email with your name to [email protected]. Good things are sometimes free, our workshop is an example 😉

Let's meet our next speaker: Elsa Oréal who will be speaking on "What Is a Family? The Case of Ancient Egyptian and Its Sister Languages".
Elsa Oréal is currently a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in the lab 'Languages and Cultures of Africa', and has taught Egyptian grammar and philology at the Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III. She received her PhD in 2000 from École Normale Supérieure with a dissertation entitled Les marques de la cohérence textuelle en égyptien ancien. In addition to her several research articles, she is also the author of the most comprehensive work ever done on the ancient Egyptian particles Les Particules en Égyptien Ancien. De l'Ancien Égyptien à l'Égyptien classique (2011). Her habilitation, Les Parfaits en Ancien Égyptien. Chemins de grammaticalisation is on its way towards publication. Some of her specific research interests include the particles, morphogenesis of the Egyptian conjugation, grammaticalization processes as a source for tense and aspect, and linguistic contact between Egyptian and Greek. She has participated in research projects on Greek semantics and syntax, Arabic linguistics, and morphology and discursive hierarchy. She has also coordinated other research projects, among which the particles and tenses in African languages particularly stand out.

Today, let us introduce to you Dr. Vit Bubenik, whose talk will be “Reconstructing Proto-Semitic Nominal and Verbal Systems in the Context of Afro-Asiatic Languages”

Vit Bubenik is Professor Emeritus of General and Historical Linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). He studied Indo-European Linguistics and Classics at the University of Brno (PhD 1969), Assyriology and Semitic languages at the University of Prague, and Sanskrit at the University of Pune (India). Among his published works are the monographs: Hellenistic and Roman Greece as a Sociolinguistics Area (1989), Historical Syntax of Late Middle Indo-Aryan (1998) and Development of Tense/Aspect in Semitic in the Context of Afro-Asiatic Languages (2017). He has co-authored two volumes on Tense and Aspect in Indo-European languages (1997), From Case to Adposition (2006) and co-edited the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics (2014). His research interests include corpus-based approaches to morpho-syntax and typology of Indo-European and Semitic languages.

Let us introduce to you another speaker, Dr. Aren Wilson-Wright, who will speak on “Rethinking the Relationship between Egyptian and Semitic: the Phonological Evidence”!

Aren Wilson-Wright is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. His research focuses on the issues of cultural contact and the transmission of religious ideas in the ancient world. His first book, Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, proposes a new model for the transmission of deities in the ancient world, through the examination of the forms of Athtart at three Late Bronze Age sites—Egypt, Emar, and Ugarit—and demonstrates how they correspond to the practices of different individuals and social groups at these sites. At the moment, he is working on his second book project, tentatively titled Egypt as a Nexus of Cultural Contact in the World of Jeremiah. This project is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Zurich. His other research interests include Semitic linguistics, comparative linguistics, religious studies, and epigraphy.

Meet our next speaker today: Zygmunt Frajzyngier, who will be speaking on "Functions Encoded in the Grammatical System and Related Lexicon in Consideration of Genetic Relationship", a paper co-authored with Michael Avina (University of Colorado).
Zygmunt Frajzyngier’s main interests include: foundations of syntax and semantics in cross-linguistic perspective; typological explanations in grammar; grammaticalization; Chadic and Afroasiatic linguistics, discovery of grammatical structures i.e. descriptive grammars and dictionaries. He is the author, co-author and editor of 23 books, and over 130 papers. His work has been supported by the NSF, NEH, Fulbright Grant, University of Colorado, ANR (France), and Humboldt Foundation. He is a recipient of Humboldt Research Prize, Pays de la Loire Chaire Régional de chercheur étranger, International Chair in Empirical Foundations of Linguistics. He held visiting professorships and guest scholarships at the University of Nice, Centre National de Recherches Scientifique, Nice Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and Center for Linguistic Typology, Institute of Advanced Study, La Trobe University. His current projects include: study of the emergence of functions; language in Afroasiatic phylum (both with Erin Shay, University of Colorado), and a study of Sino-Russian idiolects, with Natalia Gurian and Sergei Karpenko, of the Far Easter Federal University.

Have you registered to attend Rethinking the Origins in Providence April 13-15? Remember that you can do so by sending an email with your name and dietary restrictions to [email protected].