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As part of the UW Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures‘ “Conversations With Scholars” lecture series, this will be an all-access book talk that will be completely open for questions from attendees after a few brief introductory remarks from the author himself, Professor Scott Noegel.

The monograph offers a comparative study of the various functions that wordplay serves in ancient Near Eastern texts and provides a comprehensive classification for the phenomenon.

Languages covered include Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, biblical Hebrew, and Aramaic. The monograph also examines definitions of “wordplay” by exploring ancient conceptions of words and the generative role of scripts (consonantal, syllabic, and pictographic). Also discussed are issues of terminology, genre, audience, grammaticality, interpretation, and methodology.

The book further considers the distribution and preferences of these devices among the languages and discusses a number of principles and strategies that inform their creation, such as ambiguity, repetition and variation, delayed comprehension, metaphor and metonymy, clustering, and the use of rare words. The book concludes by suggesting potential avenues for future research.

Download a free copy of the book at: https://www.sbl-site.org/…/pdfs/pubs/9780884144762_OA.pdf and click on the button below to join the Zoom event on Monday, May 15, 2023 at 5:00 pm.