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Alex Foreman

Alex Foreman Picture

Alex Foreman

Graduate Student

foreman.230@osu.edu

Hagerty Hall Room 368
1775 College Road
Columbus OH, 43210

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Areas of Expertise

  • Arabic Language
  • Historical Phonology and Sociophonetics
  • Comparative Prosody

Education

  • B.A. — Linguistics, University of Chicago
  • M.A. — Arabic Language, University of Maryland

Alex Foreman is a student in the NELC doctoral program planning to study the pre-Islamic poetic corpus in light of both its late antique context and the linguistic history of Arabic. His scholarly interest centers around all forms of intentionally unusual language, including poetic dialects, scriptural reading traditions, cryptolects and conlangs. Of particular interest to him are the ways in which such forms of unusual language change over time. His areas of curiosity include Pre-Islamic and Early Umayyad Arabic Poetry, Arabic linguistic history, Medieval Hebrew liturgical reading traditions, early Qur'anic reading traditions, the performance of medieval lyric verse and the languages of the late antique Mediterranean. He is also a literary translator, principally of poetry.

Research Languages:
English, Russian, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Occitan, Old English, Yiddish, Classical Chinese, Xaladytka Romani

Workshop Papers Delivered:
"Some Jahili Knowns and Unknowns: the Language of Pre-Islamic Verse" delivered at Timelines of Arabic 1, Ohio State University (2019)

Selected Publications:
Audio recordings of reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation accompanying Khan, Geoffrey The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew: Volume 1  (Open Book Publishers, 2019) 

Translations of two Yiddish poems by H. Leivick (Asymptote, Jul 2019)

“Seven Classical Chinese Poems” in Metamorphoses: Languages and Literatures of China and the Diaspora (Special Chinese Double Issue, 2018)

“Selections from Lucan's Bellum Civile” in Metamorphoses  (Fall, 2019)

"I am from there" (translation from Arabic of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish) in Alshaer, Atef, A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi Books: 2018)

"Sacred Night” (translation of a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev) in the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, UK: Penguin Books, 2015.

“Words Spoken in Contemplation” (translation of poem by Ibn Khafāja) in Metamorphoses 19 (Special Arabic Double Issue – Spring and Fall 2011): 28-29.

Translation blog:
http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/