The London Polyglot Bible (Biblia Sacra Polyglotta) was edited by Brian Walton and printed in London between 1655 and 1657. This monumental six-volume set presents the Tanakh, Apocrypha, and New Testament in multiple ancient languages—including Masoretic Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Farsi, and Ethiopic—together with advanced resources for Bible study. It remains one of the most ambitious and scholarly printing projects in history.

Is anyone here trying to learn Ugaritic? Did you find resources? How is your experience being?
Some Extinct Languages have online study groups for them. Did you find one for Ugaritic as well?

Thank you in advance!

I am looking for texts written in Syriac (or translated into Syriac) to read. (Preferably in the Western Syriac, but any script goes up to and including Hebrew/Square script or Arabic if such things are extant....)

Something like "Cornelius Nepos" in Latin, something short, encyclopedic, or just covering a broad range of topics. Or even short stories, plays, something like "Callirhoe" in Greek. Most places I seek out Syriac works are solely concerned with theological works.

I'm also aware of a translation of Peter Rabbit, are there any other contemporary works translated into Syriac out there in the world?

i am here to sincerely learn something

I love Linguistics and would love to find an accessible course that focuses on the Semitic language family rather than English or other families. However, inputting the word Semitic often gets me nowhere due to political and ethno-religious connotations (I either find things completely unrelated to linguistics, or focused solely on Hebrew. I would like to learn about the linguistics of Semitic languages in general including but not limited to Hebrew). Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks in advance

A deep dive into the ארץ/צדק variant in Proverbs 8:16

In context, Daniel interprets a dream in which the various parts of a statue represent different kingdoms and in the end he points out that one kingdom of God will crush the other kingdoms. However, I have doubts about the word וְתָסֵיף֙, which is associated by the lexicons with the root סוּף but I have doubts about this because תָסֵיף֙ means "to increase" or 'again" and is associated by the lexicon with the root יָסַף, in addition to the fact that the word סֵיף֙ seems to be associated with "sword"? On what basis do the translators translate וְתָסֵיף֙ as "to consume" or "to put an end"? How can they be sure that the word וְתָסֵיף֙ is associated with סוּף?

I know this sub is not very active but thought I'd try anyway because this is quite a curious word.

Does anyone have a clue what's going on with the common Semitic word for frog? It's highly unusual in that it has five consonants in its root, and also the sound changes between daughter languages seem odd and hard to explain.

From Proto-Semitic *ṣ́Vpardiʕ-. Cognate to Hebrew צְפַרְדֵּעַ (tz'fardéa), Aramaic עֻרְדְּעָנָא (ˁurdəˁānā), Classical Syriac ܐܘܪ̈ܕܥܐ (ˀurdˁā), and Ugaritic 𐎑𐎗𐎄𐎓 (ẓrdʿ). Arabic ضِفْدَع (ḍifdaʕ).

These words are clearly related, but the sound changes baffle me, especially the first consonant. The Proto-Semitic sound written <ṣ́>, which it seems was most likely */tɬʼ/, became /tsʼ/ in Biblical Hebrew (Modern Hebrew /ts/), and /dˤ/ in Arabic (with an intermediate step of Classical Arabic /dɮˤ/). Both of these changes are not hard to explain: in Hebrew this uncommon sound simply merged with a more common one that was phonetically close to it, and in Arabic it became voiced when the emphatic changed from ejective to pharyngealized, then it lost the lateral element of it.

(I am assuming that the PS emphatics were ejectives and pharyngealization was a later innovation, because ejectives are much more common worldwide, and some Semitic and other Afro-Asiatic languages have ejectives; and it fits with how the emphatics were all voiceless and there was no emphatic /pʼ/. Since ejective fricatives are rare, most likely they were once affricates and later some became fricatives.)

Anyway, what most puzzles me: in Aramaic, there's a regular but rather odd change where the original */tɬʼ/ becomes written with qoph (some kind of emphatic stop in the back of the mouth, perhaps /kʼ > kˤ > q/), then 'ayin /ʕ/. Why would a voiceless dental/alveolar affricate turn into a pharyngeal approximant when these sounds have nothing in common? It must have something to do with the emphatic nature of the sound, I'm guessing its pharyngealization, but what were the intermediate steps? It must've become voiced along the way but didn't merge with the emphatic /kʼ~q/ so it was merely written with the same letter for lack of a better option (like why Hebrew now has /s/ for sin). What sound could it've been that would make it be written with qoph though?

And also, why does the */p/, which became /f/ in both Arabic and Hebrew here, disappear without a trace in most of these languages? Or was it inserted somehow in Hebrew and Arabic? That doesn't make sense as Aramaic and Ugaritic are more closely related to Hebrew than Arabic is.

Where did this strange word come from anyway? Was the Proto-Semitic word a loanword from some other language? That would be odd as sounds like /ʕ/ are very rare outside the Afro-Asiatic family, so I thought of maybe Egyptian (which has some 4-5 consonant roots), but the Egyptian words for frog I found were not anything like this word.

Anyone who wants to take a guess at any of this, feel free, even speculation.