Nick Posegay

Archives • Manuscripts • Interfaith History

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Thank you to me for making this site. Thank you to academia./edu for forcing my hand by making their own site unsuitable for hosting academic materials. Most of all, thank you to you, dear reader, for finding this weird sidebar.

Tag: Syriac

Some Notes on Melody: Saʿadya Gaon and Why ‘Naghma’ Means ‘Vowel’ in Judaeo-Arabic (2025)

The article explores the historical and linguistic contexts behind the use of the term ‘naghma’ in medieval Judaeo-Arabic to signify ‘vowel’, a meaning distinct from its Classical Arabic usage denoting ‘melody’, ‘tone’, or ‘sound’. Focusing on Saʿadya Gaon’s work, particularly his al-Qawl fī al-Nagham (‘Discourse on Melody’), the study highlights how the concept of ‘tone’
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The Illustrated Cairo Genizah (2024)

Almost one thousand years ago, the Jews of Old Cairo began to place their worn-out books and scrolls into a hidden storage room – a genizah – of their synagogue. Over the years, they added all sorts of writings to the pile, sacred and secular texts alike. When the chamber was emptied at the end
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An Early Arabic Translation of Exodus 15 from a Palestinian Melkite Psalter in the Cairo Genizah (2024)

This article presents an Arabic translation of Exodus 15 from the Cairo Genizah, preserved in two fragments of a Christian psalter (MSS CUL T-S NS 305.198 and T-S NS 305.210). The style of the psalter’s Arabic script suggests that it was copied by a well-trained scribe in the late 9th or early 10th century. Such
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Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew (2021)

In the first few centuries of Islam, Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all faced the challenges of preserving their holy texts in the midst of a changing religious landscape. This situation led Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew scholars to develop new fields of linguistic science in order to better analyse the languages of the
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To Belabour the Points: Encoding Vowel Phonology in Syriac and Hebrew Vocalization (2021)

Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods to disambiguate the vocalization of important texts, especially the Bible. The earliest step in this process was the implementation of the Syriac ‘diacritic dot’ system,
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Men of Letters in the Syriac Scribal Tradition: Dawid bar Pawlos, Rabban Rāmišoʿ, and the Family of Beṯ Rabban (2021)

Dawid bar Pawlos’ Letter on Dots is an eighth-century text that purportedly describes the introduction of some of the dots used in Syriac writing. It also sheds light on the life of a certain Rāmišoʿ of Beṯ Rabban, apparently the same man as the master of pointing named in MS BL Add. 12138. However, most
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Connecting the Dots: The Shared Phonological Tradition in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Vocalisation (2020)

This article presents new data on links between the various medieval vocalisation traditions of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. These include the identification of overlaps in the Aramaic terminology used by Jewish Masoretes and Syriac Christian grammarians and in the phonological theories that underlie them, as well as connections between Syriac and Arabic grammarians. It thus
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