Foundations for Syriac Lexicography II

I'm pleased to announce that Foundations for Syriac Lexicography II has appeared.

Here's the blurb:

"This volume is the second in a series that addresses issues related to a contemporary approach to Classical Syriac lexicography. The international team of authors invited to participate in this volume represents a wide range of disciplines and opens new horizons in lexical thinking. The essays of Dean Forbes and Janet Dyk break new ground in discussions of taxonomy and are of relevance to lexicographers of any language: Forbes applies computational methods of pattern recognition to word distribution in the Hebrew Bible and discusses its application to grammatical classification, and Dyk examines the form and functions of the Syriac passive participle. Peter Williams examines matters involved in translating Greek words with alpha privatives into Syriac. In a joint article Terry Falla and Wido van Peursen discuss the syntax and translation of two Syriac particles, gyr and dyn. Andreas Juckel provides scholars for the first time with the text of the Harklean margin to the Corpus Paulinum along with a detailed analysis. George Kiraz and Bishop Polycarpus Augin Aydin provide important information on Syriac lexica from the East that deserve to be more widely known in the West: Kiraz examines the lexical and grammatical works of Audo, Manna, and David, and Aydin provides an English translation of the methodology that Manna used in compiling his lexicon."

As far as relevance for textual criticism is concerned, Juckel's article on the Harclean is very important. Falla's and van Peursen's article on the significance of two frequent Syriac particles is also very relevant for text-critical study of γαρ and δε in the NT. My own article documents what might appear to some rather surprising forms of translation caused by difficulty rendering alpha privatives into Syriac. Here is yet another case where failure to understand the target language might lead the unwary to suppose that the version has been produced from a variant Vorlage.