On the Pronunciation of Sacred Names

Simon Hopkins (PhD, University of London) is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in Semitic philology in general, especially Arabic and Aramaic in their various ancient, mediaeval and modern forms. He has paid particular attention to the oldest records of Muslim literary Arabic as attested in the papyri of the first centuries of Islam. From the mediaeval period, he has worked on Judaeo-Arabic, in particular the earliest extant Judaeo-Arabic texts from the first millennium (written in phonetic orthography) and the somewhat later writings of Maimonides (d. 1204), some of whose autographs he has published. In the field of Aramaic, he has studied various modern Neo-Aramaic dialects still spoken in Israel. The living speech collected viva voce from the speakers themselves revealed a previously unknown dialect group which shows a systematic transitive: intransitive split in the inflection of the preterite verb. Besides the Semitic languages themselves, Simon Hopkins is interested in the history of Semitic studies and the biographies of orientalists. He has also written on the Arabic, Jewish and oriental interests of the Victorian author George Borrow (d. 1881).