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Gene B. Gragg

Gene Gragg has been involved in both linguistics and languages of the Near East since the time when, as a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago (1962-66), he became interested in applying linguistic rigor to the study of Ancient Near Eastern languages. The result was a dissertation on the dimensional infixes of Sumerian, a short form of which was eventually published as The Dimensional Infixes of Sumerian (Neukirchen, 1973).Coming back to the University of Chicago in 1969, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Linguistics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, he divided his teaching time between the two departments, with time off for a year of field work in Ethiopia. He was chair of NELC (1979-85), director of the Oriental Institute (1997-2002), and retired in 2004.

His recent research has largely evolved around problems of electronic analysis and publication of Ancient Near Eastern textual corpora, and the lexical and grammatical research tools correlated with these corpora, and with on-going projects in historical (Afroasiatic) linguistics. In this context he has designed the interface and is writing application programs  for a web-based reference archive of comparative-historical information on the Afroasiatic languages (more than 300 languages are referenced in the database, http: //oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/CUS/AAindex.html). Most recently he has been working, with the support of a Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship, on the Cushitic-Omotic Morphological Archive project, aimed at building a comparative-historical reference archive of all available morphological information on the Cushitic-Omotic languages (some fifty Afroasiatic languages spoken in the Horn of Africa) --eventually with reference to their Afroasiatic context.

Working out of this context, he has designed interface and application programs for a web-based electronic edition of the trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian) royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid (Persian) empire from the royal center Persepolis. The text is correlated with plans, drawings and photographs (for the most part unpublished) of the site and its monuments made by the Oriental Institute archaeologists who excavated Persepolis in the 1930’s. This work was done in collaboration with Matthew Stolper, Charles Jones, and John Sanders. (http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/ARI/ARI.html). A continuation of this project is the publication of the Persepolis "Fortification Tablets", a large (10,000+ tablets), unpublished corpus of administrative documents in Elamite from the Achaemenid empire, excavated by the Oriental Institute in the 1930’s.  Finally, he is now working with the co-editors of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary on grammatical and morphological aspects of  the  electronic edition of this reference tool.

Education:

• University of Chicago, Linguistics, Ph.D., 1966
• Loyola University of Chicago, Latin & Philosophy, B.A., 1960

Recent Publications:

• The Dimensional Infixes of Sumerian Alter Orient und Altes Testament Sonderreihe 5 (Neukirchen, 1973).
• Oromo Dictionary (Michigan State Univ. Press, 1982).

• Articles: “South Arabian” (pp. 60-61), “Hurrian”(pp. 125-26), “Ethiopic” (pp. 278-80), “Semitic Languages” (pp. 516-27)  In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, Volume 2, edited by Eric M. Meyers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997
• Chapters: “Geªez Phonology” (pp. 169-86), “Old South Arabian Phonology.” (pp. 161-68). In Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Including the Caucasus), edited by Alan S. Kaye, technical advisor Peter T. Daniels. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997
• “The Heron and the Turtle: Sumerian Fable.” In The Context of Scripture, edited by William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, pp. 571–73. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997
• “Geªez (Ethiopic).” In The Semitic Languages, edited by Robert Hetzron, pp. 242– 60. Routledge Language Family Descriptions. New York: Routledge, 1998
• Kuschitisch.” In Historische Semitische Sprachwissenschaft, edited by Burkhart Kienast, pp. 574–617. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001
• Review of Syntactic Change in Akkadian: The Evolution of Sentential Complementation, by Guy Deutscher. Diachronica 19: 403–8, 2001
• "Geªez (Aksum).” In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, edited by Roger D. Woodard, pp. 427–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

• “Bushes, Trees, and Networks in Afroasiatic”, Papers from the 40^th Regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Chicago; Chicago Linguistic Society, 2004).

• “Morphology and root structure: A Beja Perspective”, Aula Orientalis 23: 23 – 34, 2005

• “The ‘Weak’ Verb: Akkadian and Beja.” in The Akkadian Language in its Semitic Context. (Ed. by G. Deutscher and N. J. C. Kouwenberg). Leiden: Netherlands Institute of the Near East (PIHANS  106), 2006

• “What kind of Speech Community is represented by the 'Cushitic' Node?: Introduction to the Lexical Evidence”  in Akten des 7. internationalen Semitohamitistenkongresses (VII. ISHaK), Berlin 13. bis 15. September  2004 (= Semitica et Semitohamitica Berloinensia 5), edited by Rainer Voigt (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2007), pp. 211-236

• "Comparing Afroasiatic 'Templatic' Morphologies”, (Proceedings of the Simposio-International Group Comparative Semitic, Sitges, Spain, May 31-June 2, 2006, ed Gregorio del Olmo Lete), forthcoming.
• Synthèse. The Dynamics of Case -- Recapitulation and Future  Directions “, International Colloquium on Variations, concurrence et évolution des cas dans divers domaines linguistiques, Paris April 2-4, 2007 (at the Institut catholique and the University of Chicago Paris Center), forthcoming