Dr. Tania Notarius draws on her research to create this new course
Ugaritic is an ancient Northwest Semitic language and an early cognate of Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic. Dr. Tania Notarius, our Head of Near Eastern Languages, leads research on the historical syntax of Ugaritic, which concentrates on diverse syntactic topics. Her interest in the topic grows out of her study of archaic Biblical Hebrew poetry. From 2020-22, she represented the Polis Institute at several international conferences and published articles in leading scholarly venues about voice, tense, and impersonal constructions in Ugaritic and Hebrew. Several examples include “Impersonal Verbal Constructions in Biblical Hebrew,” Journal for Semitics, and “From Phrase to Clause: Active Participle in Ugaritic,” Acta Orientalia 74 (4): 565–581. Her research opens a new page in the historical linguistics of the Northwest Semitic languages, examining the diachronic connections between the 13th century and the 8th-10th centuries linguistic data.