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Greetings!. It’s been a long while, but if you’re interested in more posts like those you’ve seen here at hmmlorientalia, please check out fringe philology, a site I’ve set up for some of my teaching, writing, translating, etc. Here’s the about page. There are already posts on stuff in Coptic, Gəʕəz, Syriac, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, with more to come in other Aramaics, Georgian, Armenian, and more. Some posts are free, and some accessible to patrons only, but please have a look and consider subscribing! Thanks for your interest!

Here are links to a few posts:

Death and Satan in Syriac verse

a new edition and translation of the hymn of the pearl

puryå “bed” in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic

prepositions, particles, adverbs, and other little words in JBA

a favorite Jesus-miracle 🌞

little intro to Targums + Gen 11:1-9 (Targum Onqelos)

“dew” in the Manichaean Psalm-book

Bohairic Jonah, pt. 3 (1:13-16)

two lines on the Great Battle (MCH 6)

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Alin Suciu here discusses a Coptic leaf found in a Syriac manuscript from Saint Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem that I came across a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to him for his remarks!

Alin Suciu

A couple of weeks ago, Adam McCollum (Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Minnesota) sent me the photograph of the recto of a paper leaf written in the Bohairic dialect of Coptic. The fragment was used as an endpaper in a ca. 15^th-16^th century Syriac codex from the Monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem (shelfmark no. 64). Adam came across the fragment while cataloguing the Syriac and Arabic manuscripts in this location.

Upon inspection, it appeared to me that the leaf preserves a portion from the Martyrdom of Macrobius (clavis coptica 0286). According to Coptic hagiography, Macrobius was a bishop of Nikiou (Pshati) martyred under Diocletian.[1] The new fragment recovered from the Syriac manuscript is important because only one other fragment from this martyrdom has survived. Thus, in 1949, the Bollandist Paul Devos published a similar Bohairic leaf from the Martyrdom of Macrobius, which…

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Thanks to you all, dear readers, for a fun year at hmmlorientalia! Let’s hope for and do what we can to effect safety, well-being, friendship, and enjoyment of life, as we look forward to more manuscripts, texts, and languages in the one to come!

In 2012, in terms of manuscripts, I and other catalogers described several hundred manuscripts and identified several thousand distinct texts (I don’t have the exact numbers here before me), and it is our hope that this work will continue to be of use to those at work on the languages, literature, and manuscripts of Arabic/Garšūnī, Armenian, Gǝʿǝz, and Syriac. We have some exciting developments (including within vHMML) and announcements to look forward to in the coming year, so stay tuned!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 18,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

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Recently I wrote a post on translating into ancient languages. Lest any of my dear and faithful readers think me merely a theorist, here is a translation of a famous paragraph from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Syriac’d, complete with vocalization. Comments on any aspect of the document are welcome!

darwin_syriac