Peter Brylov Christensen

Primary fields of research

Primary fields of research:

• The theology in the Old Testament and its relationship to Ancient Near Eastern texts.
• Comparative Semitic philology.
• The Ugaritic text corpus.

Knowledge of languages

Primary: Akkadian, Ancient Greek, Aramaic/Syriac, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Ugaritic.

Secondary: Ancient Egyptian, Ancient North Arabian, Ancient South Arabian, Classical Ethiopic, Coptic, Latin, Phoenician/Punic, Sumerian.

Living languages: Danish, English, German, Swedish.

Current research

The focal point of my PhD project is the Semitic enclitic mem, a common morpheme attested in several dead Semitic languages, yet its semantic meaning is heavily disputed within scholarship. The Akkadian version –ma, an emphatic particle, is apparently the sole exception to this. The behavioral patterns for enclitic mem vary, as it may be suffixed to different kinds of word classes depending on the language in question. A general feature is that in nominal phrases, it may be suffixed to a noun in the construct state, something that normally is against the “conventional” grammatical rules of Semitic languages. 

The enclitic mem is a rare phenomenon in some languages, seeing that it appears only a handful of times in the Old Aramaic, Phoenician and Punic text corpora. Whether it even exists in Biblical Hebrew or not, is disputed, as well – These items will also be subject for further study. I’m also currently working on a grammatical tagging project of the Ugaritic texts, which makes it possible to perform complex grammatical searches within the texts (see Publications)

CV

Academic degrees:

2015: MA in Theology (University of Copenhagen)

2012: BA in Theology (University of Copenhagen)