Points Of Contact

A richly diverse collection of essays, memoir, poetry and photography on aspects of disability and its representation in art

"This collection of eight essays examines specific cases of contacts between Pacific Rim and western European cultures to explore the phenomena of appropriations, intersections, transculturations, and discrete identities. The exchanges in ideas, religion, and culture resulting from contacts among these areas, whether through actual or virtual travel, indicate mutual affinities and occasionally interdependencies, but also separate and independent identities. Each of these essays concerns the portability, mutability, and adaptability of aspects of the exchange of ideas, and, in nearly all cases here examined, an affirmation of identity on the part of each culture in the exchange. The cases of intersections examined here generally indicate developments of cultures approaching one another and then retrenching."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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.

Only love can heal an impossibly broken heart There’d forever been a thread running through Trevor Estes’s life—his son, Riley, strong and constant like a heartbeat. But when Riley is killed in combat, everything in Trevor’s life unravels into a mess he doesn’t know how to mourn. Then Jesse Byrne, Riley’s friend and platoon mate, arrives on Trevor’s doorstep with a box of Riley’s things. Jesse’s all-too-familiar grief provides an unlikely source of comfort for Trevor: knowing he’s not alone is exactly what he needs. Trevor never imagined he’d find someone who fills his heart with hope again. As the pair celebrate Riley’s memory, their unique bond deepens into something irreplaceable—and something neither man can live without. But diving into a relationship can’t be so simple. Being together means Trevor risking the last link he has to his son…leaving Jesse to wonder if he’ll ever be enough, or if Trevor will always be haunted by the past. This book is approximately 120,000 words One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise! Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Alissa Davis