PREFACE

In recent years it has become a commonplace among sociolingu ists as well

as among anthropologists and semioticians that so much of language
behavior, and even structure, is context-dependent that it is essential for
language to be studied within its social and cultural context. Much research
has been carried out studying modern languages and societies in this way.
Yet questions of this nature have been little addressed where Near Eastern
cultures are concerned. This is especially true of the ancient and medieval
periods . Of course, there are obvious difficulties in trying to reconstruct
far removed cultural contexts when all the linguistic documentation in our
possession is textual, and often not readily available. Nonetheless, even in
this situation, studying of the institutional aspects of ancient, medieval
and modern languages in Near Eastern cultures, and of their functions
within their various societies, can contribute greatly to our understanding
of both distinctly linguistic phenomena and social structures or cultural
dynamics.
The articles presented in this volume constitute a modest effort to deal
with the relationship between language and culture over more than four
millennia of written history from three major perspectives. The first group
of articles, by scholars who concern themselves with dead languages and
ancient cultures, try to reconstruct the cultural setting out of textual
evidence. Rina Drory deals with the introductions to two editions of a
10th century handbook for poets written in Hebrew and in Arabic, and
discusses how cultural images of knowledge, scholarship, and audience
are determined by the choice of language. Hannes Galter, dealing with
royal inscriptions in the world of ancient Mesopotamia, tackles the
question of the raison d 'etre of bilingual royal inscriptions. Barbara
Nevling Porter, also in ancient Mesopotamia and its sphere of influence,
looks at inscriptions which seem prima facie to have been unintelligible to
their original audience , and shows, by means of textual and extra-textual
evidence, who their audiences were and what the impact of these
inscriptions on them may have been. Benjamin Hary deals with the
translators and audiences of Judeo-Arabic texts in pre-modern Egypt.
Shlomo Izre'el attempts to show that linguistic data are invaluable in
retrieving some notion of the diplomatic and messenger systems of the
ancient Levant of the 14th century B.C. hamar Singer asks how much of

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8 Preface

the extant literature in the Hittite language is original, and how much is
borrowed and translated.
A second group of scholars, whose interests range from ancient Egypt
and biblical Palestine to their modern geographical counterparts, consider
the cultural disposition of linguistic choice. Muhammad Hasan Amara
shows that current descriptions of the contemporary situation in
Palestinian Arabic are inadequate; it is not sufficient to assert the existence
of a diglossia between the standard language and the colloquial one: life
imposes itself on this dichotomy and changes it. Gabriel M. Rosenbaum
shows how interplay between the standard literary language and the
colloquial one is manipulated by playwrights in Egypt for their dramatic
needs. A similar idea leads Gary A. Rendsburg to the conclusion that
some Biblical Hebrew texts reflect manipulation by their authors who
were employing foreignisms recognized as such by their original audiences.
Orly Goldwasser tries to capture the moment when an ancient Egyptian
scribe of the 12th century BiC. shifts his written register between the
administrative epistolary and the poetic. Finally, on the subject of language
planning and standardization, Shlomit Shraybom-Shivtiel shows how
and why the Arabic Language Academy in Egypt in this century changed
its attitude towards the borrowing of colloquial words into the standard,
upper lexicon.
The third group of contributors are more concerned with cultural
settings which determine, or rather affect, linguistic interference. Michael
L. Chyet discusses the historical, cultural, folkloristic and linguistic
contacts between Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic. Baruch Podolsky studies
the nature and future prospects of the influence on modern Hebrew of the
recent mass immigration into Israel from the former Soviet Union. Saul
Levin takes a different approach altogether to show how cultural and
linguistic contacts between the Greek superstratum and local Semitic
languages in the first millennium A.D . influenced the writing systems of
the languages involved.
The articles in this volume have been collected with the aim of
encouraging further research in the diverse fields spanned by cultural
linguistics . The task was not easy to begin with, nor did it become easier as
work advanced . Bridging the gap between culture and language appears
difficult in Near Eastern studies, regardless of the varying geographical or
chronological settings of the cultures involved . We acknowledge with
great respect the endeavors of the scholars who have accepted the
challenge, and contributed from their knowledge and expertise to this
volume. We thank them with all our heart.

The editors

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