Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic Corpus

We propose a method for efficiently finding all parallel passages in a large corpus, even if the passages are not quite identical due to rephrasing and orthographic variation. The key ideas are the representation of each word in the corpus by its two most infrequent letters, finding matched pairs of strings of four or five words that differ by at most one word and then identifying clusters of such matched pairs. Using this method, over 4600 parallel pairs of passages were identified in the Babylonian Talmud, a Hebrew-Aramaic corpus of over 1.8 million words, in just over 30 seconds. Empirical comparisons on sample data indicate that the coverage obtained by our method is essentially the same as that obtained using slow exhaustive methods.Comment: Submission to the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

Wild Dreamers: Meditations on the Admissibiity of Dream Talk

This article presents a mosaic of interrelated meditations on how judges have dealt with the admissibility of dream talk, interspersed with short digressions on the meaning of dreams from a variety of historical and cultural perspectives. In Part I, I begin with theories about dreams from Aristotle, Hobbes, and others. I then tell the story of O.J. Simpson, wild dreamer extraordinaire, interrupted by a Freudian interlude and a speculation about the theories that the jurors may have silently applied to Simpson\u27s dreams of killing his wife. In Part II, I present three wild dreamers from family court: a husband who dreams of his wife\u27s car exploding, a father who dreams about the future, and a six-year-old girl who dreams of her own murder by her father. I explore how this girl would have fared under Carl Jung\u27s theory of dreaming, or in the dreaming culture of the seventeenth century Iroquois. In Part III, I tell the story of the penultimate wild dreamer who dreamed he had killed a young woman (but had not) and ponder his confusion from the point of view of Descartes and the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou, ending with an interlude about what dreams mean in Tibetan Buddhism. In Part IV, I present the tale of the ultimate wild dreamer-a man who dreamed someone else had killed a young woman and ended up convicted of that crime

Book Reviews

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The Gandavyuha-Sutra: A study of wealth, gender and power in an Indian Buddhist narrative.

In this thesis, I examine the roles of wealth, gender and power in the Mahayana Buddhist scripture known as the Gandavyuha-sutra, using contemporary textual theory, narratology and worldview analysis. I argue that the wealth, gender and power of the spiritual guides (kalyanamitras, literally 'good friends') in this narrative reflect the social and political hierarchies and patterns of Buddhist patronage in ancient Indian during the time of its compilation. In order to do this, I divide the study into three parts. In part I, 'Text and Context', I first investigate what is currently known about the origins and development of the Gandavyuha, its extant manuscripts, translations and modem scholarship. Next, using a relative chronology based on current research into the origins of the Mahayana, I argue for the 3rd century CE, as likely time of origin, and suggest Dhanyakataka/Dharanlkota as the place of origin for the text. In part II, 'Structures', I examine the text's worldview and narrative structures. In chapter 3, I investigate the notions of reality, society and the individual. In chapter 4,1 outline some key concepts developed by the Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal (1997) and demonstrate how these concepts may be utilised in an analysis of the Gandavyuha. I begin part III, 'Forces', by considering Derrida's (2001) notion of 'force' as a critique of structuralism's overly 'geometric' model in the study of narrative. In an attempt to synthesise structure and force in part III, I examine the various structures outlined in previous chapters in relation to the themes of wealth, gender and power, as they unfold chronologically within the narrative From this study, I conclude that in the Gandavyuha, wealth functions as a sign of spiritual status, the significant number of royal female kalydnamitras reflects the importance of female patrons at the time of the text's compilation, and the spiritual hierarchy within the story mirrors the political hierarchies of Buddhism's Middle Period in India

Studies in Jaina History and Culture

The last ten years have seen interest in Jainism increasing, with this previously little-known Indian religion assuming a significant place in religious studies. Studies in Jaina History and Culture breaks new ground by investigating the doctrinal differences and debates amongst the Jains rather than presenting Jainism as a seamless whole whose doctrinal core has remained virtually unchanged throughout its long history. The focus of the book is the discourse concerning orthodoxy and heresy in the Jaina tradition, the question of omniscience and Jaina logic, role models for women and female identity, Jaina schools and sects, religious property, law and ethics. The internal diversity of the Jaina tradition and Jain techniques of living with diversity are explored from an interdisciplinary point of view by fifteen leading scholars in Jaina studies. The contributors focus on the principal social units of the tradition: the schools, movements, sects and orders, rather than Jain religious culture in abstract. Peter Flügel provides a representative snapshot of the current state of Jaina studies that will interest students and academics involved in the study of religion or South Asian cultures

Empire and Politics in the Eastern and Western Civilizations

The volume includes the proceedings of the 2nd Roma Sinica conference held in 2019 and aims to compare some features of the ancient political thought in the Western classical tradition and in the Eastern ancient thought. The contributors propose new patterns of interpretation of the mutual interactions and proximities between these two cultural worlds and offer also a perspective of continuity between contemporary and ancient political thought

Language Contact as Bilingual Contrast among Bai Language Users in Jianchuan County, China.

This dissertation explores Bái language use in Jiànchuān County, China. On the basis of interviews with 42 language users, transcripts of spontaneous conversation and elicited narratives, excerpts from Bái texts in an alphabetic orthography and Chinese characters, and six months of participant observation, I demonstrate how language users’ perceptions of Bái and Chinese as distinct languages emerge as the result of interactional and representational strategies that alternatively foreground and background bilingual contrast. I argue that these micro-level strategies exist in a dialectical relationship with macro-level governmental, academic, and lay discourses that represent the Bái and the Hàn as essentially different, ethnicity as isomorphic with language, and, consequently, diverse Bái linguistic practices as a distinct minority nationality language. By demonstrating that borders of communities cannot be relied upon to describe consensus about linguistic structure, use, or ideologies, this dissertation contributes to more realistic descriptions of language; relatedly, by showing that language users’ perceptions of the elements in their repertoire as “Bái “ or “Chinese” vary not only across language users, but also situations of use, it challenges synchronic theories of language contact that invoke community consensus to distinguish between “borrowing” and “code switching.” More fundamentally, both lines of analysis entail that language users’ interactional and representational strategies do not merely reproduce pre-existing contrast between languages, but also actively produce and transform it.Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86339/1/hefright_1.pd