Egyptian, Semitic and General Grammar: Studies in Memory of H. J. Polotsky.

• Author: Pat-El, Na'ama
• Position: Book review

Egyptian, Semitic and General Grammar: Studies in Memory of H. J. Polotsky. Edited by GIDEON GOLDENBERG and ARIEI SHISHA-HALEVY. Jerusalem: THE ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, 2009. Pp. xix + 501.

Hans Jakob Polotsky (HJP) was the founder of the Linguistics Department in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an Egyptologist whose ideas revolutionized the field. Among his students are such well-known and diverse scholars as Edward Ullendorfr, Olga Kapeliuk, and Miriam Lichtheim, among others. The volume under review is a collection of twenty-five papers read at a conference in his memory and edited by two of his former students, an Egyptologist (A. Shisha-Halevy) and a Semitist (G.Goldenberg). My comments below will refer solely to the Semitic material in the book. The reader is directed to the book's introduction for a lengthy, occasionally idiosyncratic, review of the papers.

Although HJP's main contribution to linguistics was in Egyptology, the majority of the papers here deal with Semitic languages, including languages about which he never published (Modern Hebrew, Akkadian). Neo-Aramaic is unrepresented in this volume, despite being of great interest to HJP. Another mystifying absence is a contribution by one of HJP's favorite students, Olga Kapeliuk, whose recent work focuses on Neo-Aramaic.

The book adequately opens with Ullendorff's entertaining memoir of his time as a student of HJP and their acquaintance thereafter, a delight to anyone familiar with the German Jewish scholarS who constituted the faculty of the Hebrew University in its early days.

Eran Cohen discusses the notion of nexus and nexus-focusing in Old Babylonian, following Goldenberg's expansive treatment of the topic in Hebrew. The paper could benefit from a thorough editing; the very long review of the literature and discussion of minute aspects of terminology overshadow some of the interesting ideas in this paper. Another paper focused on Akkadian is Nathan Wasserman's syntactic and semantic study of the modal particle tusa.

Rafael Talmon explores the Arabic construction tamyiz, a function of the accusative which is not assigned by verbal valency. Talmon discusses the categorization of the different types and its evolution within the Arabic grammatical tradition. The paper is fascinating and provides a plethora of data, both for the historian of linguistic thought and for the Semitist.

Joshua Blau, a prominent scholar of Middle Arabic, once again confronts...