Review of Crellin, The semantics of word division in northwest Semitic writing systems

BRYN MAYR CLASSICAL REVIEW: The semantics of word division in northwest Semitic writing systems: Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite and Greek.

Robert S.D. Crellin, The semantics of word division in northwest Semitic writing systems: Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite and Greek. Contexts of and relations between early writing systems (CREWS) . Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2022. Pp. 256. ISBN 9781789256772.

Review by
Joseph Lam, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. jclam@email.unc.edu

In this highly technical monograph, Robert Crellin surveys the phenomenon of so-called “word dividers” in Northwest Semitic epigraphic texts in an effort to discern what principles, if any, might guide their distribution. ...

The history of word divisions in writing sometimes makes me wonder when people first noticed that their language had words and wasn't just the flow of their thoughts. Perhaps this came later than we might think.

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