Rethinking the Origins

Today, let us introduce to you Dr. Vit Bubenik, whose talk will be “Reconstructing Proto-Semitic Nominal and Verbal Systems in the Context of Afro-Asiatic Languages”

Vit Bubenik is Professor Emeritus of General and Historical Linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). He studied Indo-European Linguistics and Classics at the University of Brno (PhD 1969), Assyriology and Semitic languages at the University of Prague, and Sanskrit at the University of Pune (India). Among his published works are the monographs: Hellenistic and Roman Greece as a Sociolinguistics Area (1989), Historical Syntax of Late Middle Indo-Aryan (1998) and Development of Tense/Aspect in Semitic in the Context of Afro-Asiatic Languages (2017). He has co-authored two volumes on Tense and Aspect in Indo-European languages (1997), From Case to Adposition (2006) and co-edited the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics (2014). His research interests include corpus-based approaches to morpho-syntax and typology of Indo-European and Semitic languages.

Let us introduce to you another speaker, Dr. Aren Wilson-Wright, who will speak on “Rethinking the Relationship between Egyptian and Semitic: the Phonological Evidence”!

Aren Wilson-Wright is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. His research focuses on the issues of cultural contact and the transmission of religious ideas in the ancient world. His first book, Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, proposes a new model for the transmission of deities in the ancient world, through the examination of the forms of Athtart at three Late Bronze Age sites—Egypt, Emar, and Ugarit—and demonstrates how they correspond to the practices of different individuals and social groups at these sites. At the moment, he is working on his second book project, tentatively titled Egypt as a Nexus of Cultural Contact in the World of Jeremiah. This project is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Zurich. His other research interests include Semitic linguistics, comparative linguistics, religious studies, and epigraphy.