Linguistic Studies in Phoenician: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham honors the late Professor J. Brian Peckham, a scholar who has been instrumental in furthering the cause of Phoenician studies over the past decades. His passion made him an exceptional teacher, and his research on Phoenician studies resulted in his Phoenicia: Episodes and Anecdotes from the Ancient Mediterranean (Eisenbrauns, 2014), which he finished just prior to his passing in September 2008. This collection of studies dedicated to his memory is aimed at advancing our understanding of the grammatical and historical features of the Phoenician language, a favorite topic that Professor Peckham rigorously studied and taught. The first set of studies concentrates on linguistic features of Phoenician qua Phoenician. They include investigations of phonology and morphology, as well as linguistic approaches to syntax and text-level pragmatics. The second set of studies seeks to situate aspects of the Phoenician language typologically or within comparative, etymological, and historical Semitics. The result is a group of studies covering topics ranging from case endings, negation, pronominal usage, and phonology to dialectology, etymologies, and text linguistics. Given the use of Phoenician throughout the Mediterranean littoral, this volume contains something of interest for numerous areas of investigation, including comparative Semitics, Anatolian, early Mediterranean, and even Hebrew and biblical studies.

Linguistic Studies in Phoenician: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham honors the late Professor J. Brian Peckham, a scholar who has been instrumental in furthering the cause of Phoenician studies over the past decades. His passion made him an exceptional teacher, and his research on Phoenician studies resulted in his Phoenicia: Episodes and Anecdotes from the Ancient Mediterranean (Eisenbrauns, 2014), which he finished just prior to his passing in September 2008. This collection of studies dedicated to his memory is aimed at advancing our understanding of the grammatical and historical features of the Phoenician language, a favorite topic that Professor Peckham rigorously studied and taught. The first set of studies concentrates on linguistic features of Phoenician qua Phoenician. They include investigations of phonology and morphology, as well as linguistic approaches to syntax and text-level pragmatics. The second set of studies seeks to situate aspects of the Phoenician language typologically or within comparative, etymological, and historical Semitics. The result is a group of studies covering topics ranging from case endings, negation, pronominal usage, and phonology to dialectology, etymologies, and text linguistics. Given the use of Phoenician throughout the Mediterranean littoral, this volume contains something of interest for numerous areas of investigation, including comparative Semitics, Anatolian, early Mediterranean, and even Hebrew and biblical studies.

Carefully selected examples from texts and dialects of the whole Phoenician-Punic period bring to life the grammatical description of this language. Included are fully vocalized Punic and Neo-Punic inscriptions of Roman Tripolitiana in Latin orthography as well as the literary fragments of Punic drama as found in Plautus' comedy Poenulus. This classical descriptive grammar of the Phoenician-Punic language (1200 BCE - 350 CE) presents the reader with a full picture: its phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and usage. Its history and its various dialects are dealt with in an introduction. Hebraists and Semitists will find the description of the verbal system of particular interest to them, especially that of the literary language, which holds that tense and aspect reference of a given form of the verb is largely a function of syntax, not morphology. Much of this grammatical material is presented here for the first time.

A comprehensive and up-to-date account of the languages of ancient Sicily by an international team of experts.