Another great link from Paul Ogden:
Electronic Journal for Ancient and Oriental Studies
Le nom BABELAO signifie « Bulletin de l’ABELAO », plus précisément « Bulletin de l’Académie Belge pour l’Etude des Langues Anciennes et Orientales ». L’ABELAO est une association sans but lucratif qui veut promouvoir l’enseignement et la recherche dans le domaine des cultures et des langues anciennes et orientales, notamment par l’organisation de sessions de cours d’été sur le site de l’Université de Louvain, à Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique).
Son bulletin, le BABELAO, est conçu comme une revue à vocation scientifique. La revue couvre le domaine de l’Orientalisme sous ses différentes facettes : philologie, paléographie, histoire du monde ancien et oriental, histoire des langues et des littératures comparées, édition des textes, etc.
There are three issues online so far, with all the articles freely downloadable as pdfs; most are in French, but each issue has from one to three in English. From BABELAO 1 (2012), for instance, I enjoyed J.K. Elliott, “Recent Trends in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament: A New Millenium, a New Beginning?“; Elliott has a lively and acerbic style apparent in these brief excerpts:
But before we accentuate the positive, we need to speak of the Editio critica maior and of the Latin New Testament, some of whose problems, though now less dire, nonetheless still continue to blight our new century.
Websites accompany this new kindling of interest among younger scholars who have encouraged this electronic medium for intercourse on textual criticism, irritatingly matey though such a form of scholarly contact may be to some of the more “mature members” of the Academy. Nonetheless, a site such as evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.org [Actually evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com — LH] which, despite its off-putting and bizarre name, is in effect a valuable source of information about current activity in New Testament textual criticism, attracting as it does a regular number of generally predictable contributors who seem to keep their collective ears to the ground.
The days should now well be past when an apparatus such as Nestle or UBS (singularly prone to overblown listings of Fathers) can pull the wool over our eyes by adding the mere name of a Father to support a given variant. IGNTP Luke quoted patristic witnesses only with the context of the quotation and the latest printed edition shown where the father’s work could be consulted.
A couple of interesting-looking articles related to Georgia: BABELAO 2 (2013), p. 159-171, Elene Gogiashvili, “About Georgian Fairytales,” and BABELAO 3 (2014), p. 125-144, Emmanuel Van Elverdinghe, “La linguistique marriste et son onomastique: Le cas de la Géorgie.” Lots of interesting stuff here; thanks, Paul!
There is an error in the original text; it should be evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com.
Good catch! I’ve added a note to the excerpt.
evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com is the URL for a blog boringly (if transparently) named “Evangelical Textual Criticism,” which hardly seems off-putting (unless you don’t like evangelicals, or don’t like textual criticism, or think they should have had a cleverer name) and certainly not bizarre.
I suspect the thought process is just “long hard-to-parse concatenation of letters with dots here and there! bizarre!”; New Testament scholars who have been in the field for years probably are not at the forefront of technological awareness. I mean, he’s trumpeting the use of computers as a brave step forward for the field.
The author (of whom I know no ill, and who may well be a saintly person in real life) seems to pass right through acerbity into mean-spiritedness in places.
The article about Hurrian entertainingly suggests that it may be related to Nakh-Dagestani *and* Indoeuropean, though to be fair the author does quite properly point out that attempts to prove that it is related to “Caucasian” are rather implausible given that the three indigenous Caucasian families don’t actually seem to be related to *each other* … and accepts that Indoeuropeanists are unlikely to be convinced.
Describing Armenian as “proche du grec” seems a bit of a stretch too, though I suppose the ancestor of Armenian was a good bit procher du grec when the speakers were taking over the Urartian territory.
The author (of whom I know no ill, and who may well be a saintly person in real life) seems to pass right through acerbity into mean-spiritedness in places.
True, but I must confess I enjoy that (as long as my own ox is not gored, of course).
Describing Armenian as “proche du grec” seems a bit of a stretch too
Actually, there is evidence for a Greco-Armenian node (better, Helleno-Armenian; “Greek” is not a single language but a small family) within IE; not many of them, but you need a separate piece of special pleading to explain away each one of them.