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The volume consists of six parts devoted to literature, languages, history, culture, science, religions and philosophy of the Eastern World. Its aim is to portray the present-day state of oriental studies, which are here understood predominantly as philologies of Asia and Africa, but also as a field of study including other, adjacent disciplines of the humanities, not neglecting the history of oriental research. The book’s multidisciplinary content reflects the multi- and often interdisciplinary nature of oriental studies today. Part 1 (Literature) offers new insights into belles-lettres written in Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Urdu, Persian and Japanese. Part 2 (Linguistics) contains studies on...
Due to the diversity of perspectives and methodologies within the relative uniformity of the subject, this collection of papers offers a rich overview of the multidisciplinary research on Arabic literature. The book includes two thematic parts. The first of them pertains to studies on Arabic literature, more precisely, on historical chronicles concerning the First Crusade, one of al-Ğāḥiẓ's Treatise and also Modern Egyptian, Moroccan and Omani literary production. The second section of the volume contains papers on Semitic languages: Modern Hebrew, Maltese, Classical, Modern Standard, Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. The volume is devoted to Elżbieta Gorska.
This volume offers the first comprehensive study on the history of Middle Western Karaim dialects. The author provides a systematic description of sound changes dating from the 17th–19th-centuries and reconstructs their absolute- and relative chronologies. In addition, the main morphological peculiarities are presented in juxtaposition to Modern Western Karaim data. The textual basis for this historical-linguistic investigation is a critical edition of pre-1800 Western Karaim interpretations of Hebrew religious songs called piyyutim (149 texts altogether). The reason behind this choice is that some of these texts are among the oldest known Western Karaim texts in general, and that until now no study has brought the Karaim translation tradition in this genre closer to the reader.
The book presents many aspects of the phenomenon of translation and commentary work of the Bible in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries. It contains studies of eminent scholars as well as of some young adepts, coming mainly from Poland, but also from Lithuania and Czech Republic. The texts present various aspects of the researches conducted on this phenomenon nowadays. As it was an exceptional movement, extremely varied and long-time lasting, it would be difficult to offer its complete synthesis in one volume. Though, the exhaustive presentation of the historical and linguistic contexts allows the reader to understand the phenomenon. Intensified interest in tran...
Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.
The work presents -- as far as is now possible -- the language spoken by Lutsk Karaims in the second half of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries. This is attempted by means of editing eleven private letters and five open letters written in Lutsk Karaim -- with Hebrew interpolations. The letters were written by different authors in Hebrew script.The present publication appears to be the first critical edition of this type of text written in this particular dialect. Previous editions of south-western Karaim manuscripts either concerned very short texts from Halych or were prepared with no intention of being professional.The linguistic description of the texts aims to pr...
This volume offers the critical edition and an English translation of the oldest translation of the Pentateuch into Western Karaim copied in 1720 by Simcha ben Chananel (died 1723). The manuscript was compared against several other Karaim translations of the Torah as well as with the standard text of the Hebrew Bible. The author provides a description of the manuscript’s language and an outline of the history of Western Karaim translations of the Torah to better understand the its philological and historical background.
Unter Rekurs auf zwei historische Erscheinungsformen des Ghettos – auf jüdische Wohnviertel der Frühen Neuzeit und nationalsozialistische Ghettos – wurde der Begriff ‚Ghetto’ zum Symbol von Joch und Verfolgung stilisiert. Diese Sprachpraxis etablierte eine einseitige Forschungsperspektive, die sich ihrem Gegenstand aus dem Täter-Opfer-Paradigma heraus näherte. In der jüngsten Zeit unternahm man jedoch Versuche, diese Perspektive zu brechen, indem man das Ghetto-Phänomen anhand solcher Untersuchungskategorien wie ‚Lebenswelt’, ‚Erfahrung’ und ‚Konstruktion von Raum’ sowie ‚Ambivalenz von Raum und Grenze’ befragte. Das stetig wachsende Interesse an begrifflicher R...