This guide is meant to direct the student through an inductive reading of Biblical Aramaic. For most effective use, consult the indicated sections of the textbook whenever they are mentioned, even if it seems repetitive. Repetition is the point.

Biblical Aramaic, as part of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, is written with the same consonantal signs, vowel points, and cantillation marks as the Hebrew portions (§17), as well as having the same types of scribal annotation and marking (the Ketiv-Qere [§33] and other notes). Although the languages are different, there is no graphic differentiation between Hebrew and Aramaic in the Masoretic text.

The purpose of this chapter is to give readers a sense of the breadth of experimental applications in the social sciences. The chapter reviews lab, field, and survey experiments, as well as naturally-occurring experiments such as lotteries. Each type of experiment is illustrated by reviewing in detail an exemplary study, drawing from experimental literature in psychology, development economics, health, and political science. Special attention is paid to the design choices that researchers made when recruiting subjects, measuring outcomes, and allocating subjects to experimental conditions. Discussion of each study includes the analysis of its main statistical findings. By showing how experiments are designed and analyzed, this chapter lays the groundwork for the practice experiment that readers will undertake in Chapter 6.

Word formation has two components: derivation and inflection. Derivation refers to the formation of the lexical base of nouns and verbs, and inflection refers to the addition of suffixes or prefixes to express gender, person, number and (in verbs) tense, aspect, and mood.

Discourse markers, or half-conjunctions, do not link two sentences together. Rather, they link a sentence to a preceding discourse, logically or temporally. They may be combined with וְ or precede subordinating conjunctions. In other contexts, they may serve as adverbs or as coordinating conjunctions. Unlike “full” coordinating conjunctions, they do not mark the B-clause of coordinated pairs.

Prepositions, by and large, stand outside of the three-consonant root system, although some triliteral nouns have developed into prepositions.

Aramaic is a language of central importance for the study of the ancient world, beginning from the early first millennium BCE up to the Islamic period and beyond. Aramaic stories are found in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament), and Aramaic influence is felt in the Greek text of the New Testament. It was the language of Eastern Christianity for centuries, as well as a major language of Jewish literature (along with Hebrew) through most of the first millennium CE. It still survives as a spoken language in a few communities (and their diasporas) in parts of the Middle East.

In the civil versus uncivil comparison, the group treated with uncivil discourse and the “baseline” group exposed to civil discourse watch a debate between political candidates. In this case, the average treatment effect (ATE) represents the average effect of exposure to debates with different levels of civility. Comparing the untreated control group to the treatment group exposed to uncivil dialogue, on the other hand, captures both the effect of watching a political debate (regardless of civility) and the effect of uncivil discourse.

Before conducting an experiment with human subjects, researchers much consider a number of important ethical and regulatory constraints. This chapter reviews the leading ethical concerns that arise in the context of human subjects research in general and experimental research in particular. These ethical concerns have also set in motion regulations, such as The Common Rule, that researchers must follow before launching a study. The chapter concludes by discussing other professional norms, such as research transparency.

The field of quantum research is currently undergoing a revolution. A variety of tools and platforms for controlling individual quantum particles have emerged, which can be utilized to develop entirely new technologies for computation, communication, and sensing. In particular, these technologies will enable applications of quantum information science that can fundamentally change the way we store, process, and transmit information. Exciting theoretical predictions exist for quantum computers, with some proof-of-principle experiments, to perform calculations that would overwhelm the world’s best conventional supercomputers. Quantum research is rapidly developing, and the race is intensifying for quantum technology development, involving some of the high-tech giants. In this chapter we will introduce some key concepts in the materials and devices behind these technological developments. Becoming familiar with these concepts in this first chapter should provide the reader with concrete goals and motivations for studying the quantum methods and tools described in subsequent chapters.

The phonemic inventory of Biblical Aramaic consonants is given in Table 5.

Quantum mechanics is currently the most fundamental theory in use in many disciplines of science and engineering. It is particularly important when one is dealing with nanoscale and atomic-scale systems. However, many phenomena and properties that occur at atomic scales are strange and nonintuitive. There are a number of concepts that simply do not exist in the macroscopic world where we live. Wave–particle duality is one of them. In this chapter, we examine how and when classical particles start behaving as quantum mechanical waves, derive the most important wave equation that quantum particles obey, Schrödinger’s equation, and solve it for the elementary problems of electron waves in given potential energy landscapes. We will also learn how to calculate the expectation values of observables when the wavefunction is known. Schrödinger’s equation will be extensively used throughout the rest of this textbook. More complicated potential energy problems, particularly those relevant to materials and devices, will be dealt with in Chapters 5 and 7, building upon the formulations developed in this chapter.

Verbs have different properties that affect number and nature of the complements that it has, namely, valence, voice, and Aktionsart.