Contact Points

In the first few centuries of Islam, Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all faced the challenges of preserving their holy texts in the midst of a changing religious landscape. This situation led Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew scholars to develop new fields of linguistic science in order to better analyse the languages of the Bible and the Qurʾān. Part of this work dealt with the issue of vocalisation in Semitic scripts, which lacked the letters required to precisely record all the vowels in their languages. Semitic scribes thus developed systems of written vocalisation points to better record vowel sounds, first in Syriac, then soon after in Arabic and Hebrew. These new points opened a new field of linguistic analysis, enabling medieval grammarians to more easily examine vowel phonology and explore the relationships between phonetics and orthography. Many aspects of this new field of vocalisation crossed the boundaries between religious communities, first with the spread of ‘relative’ vocalisation systems prior to the eighth century, and later with the terminology created to name the discrete vowels of ‘absolute’ vocalisation systems. This book investigates the theories behind Semitic vocalisation and vowel phonology in the early medieval Middle East, tracing their evolution to identify points of intellectual contact between Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew linguists before the twelfth century.

The only way forward for business success is to create a memorable brand and fix it in the consumer's mind. Branding Your Business will help you to do this by explaining the whole branding process in easy-to-follow terms. Providing practical help instead of academic theories, it explains what a brand is and what it is not, how to conduct a 'DIY' brand audit and how to use marketing NLP and psychology principles to create a powerful brand for your business.Based around the theory that a brand is the total perception a customer has about a company, its products or services, Branding Your Business will reveal just what you need to do to create and manage successful brands, enabling you to improve profits and leave your competition standing.

Tackle the Challenges of Parallel Programming in the Visual Effects IndustryIn Multithreading for Visual Effects, developers from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Side Effects, Intel, and AMD share their successes and failures in the messy real-world application area of production software. They provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and