Silje Alvestad Livres

This book focuses on the Uppsala manuscript, O. nova 546, of Muhammed Heva'i Üskufi Bosnevi’s work, Maḳbul-i 'arif, from 1631. Handwritten in Ottoman script, the manuscript arrived at the University Library in Uppsala in 1924. Often misidentified as the first Bosnian-Turkish dictionary, this label is misleading. The work consists of three parts: a sophisticated foreword, the main content, and an afterword, with the dictionary section being versified, dialogue-oriented, and organized by topic. It contains approximately 650 Bosnian words. The book aims to address the lack of turcological analysis of Maḳbul-i 'arif, which has primarily been studied from a Bosnian cultural or linguistic perspective. It argues for the necessity of examining the work through a turcological lens. The contributions include a detailed grapheme-by-grapheme transliteration of the manuscript, a transcription, and an English translation of the entire text, all of which have not been previously undertaken. The English translation aims to make Maḳbul-i 'arif accessible to a broader audience. The author, Silje Susanne Alvestad, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo's Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages.

This is a detailed study on the insertion of epenthetic vowels in verbal and nominal forms primae and mediae gutturalis, in Biblical Hebrew, as well as in normative and spoken Modern Hebrew. The monograph aims at showing the following: 1) Apparent irregularity in a linguistic system, here on the phonological level, can be resolved within a network of transparent rules, which reflect the interaction of various parameters. 2) The tension between the norm and the corresponding reality in a linguistic system is by no means just a modern phenomenon, but can, in the case of Hebrew, be traced all the way back to the classical stages of said linguistic system. 3) The sonority scale in conjunction with the relevant preference laws for syllable structure has once again proven to be a powerful explanatory device in phonological theory and emerged as the central argument in the context of our research. 4) Optimality Theory offers a theoretical framework for arranging an array of relevant constraints in order to account for the variety of observable output forms in the Tiberian Hebrew tradition, many forms of which continue to be valid in modern times.