American linguist
Richard C. Steiner (born 1945) is a Semitist and a scholar of Northwest Semitic languages, Jewish Studies, and Near Eastern texts. His work has focused on texts from as early as the Egyptian Pyramid texts to as late as medieval biblical interpretation. He is now retired from his position as professor of Semitics at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University in New York City.
Life and career.
Steiner received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Biblical, Semitic, and Jewish Studies (under Moshe Greenberg, later of the Hebrew University) and linguistics (under Henry M. Hoenigswald and William Labov). He collaborated with Labov on an important study of sound changes in spoken languages.
Steiner's early work focused on the phonology of Semitic languages, especially Hebrew. In one book he argued that the letter known as Hebrew sin was pronounced as a fricative-lateral and in another he argued that the pronunciation of the letter tsade as an affricate, /ts/, is very old and widespread, against others who had doubted this. These books have convinced most specialists.
In 2007 Steiner gave a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which he announced that he had deciphered linguistically Semitic spells in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts from the mid-third millennium BC. This discovery was reported on by National Geographic, Science Daily, and others. In July 2010 he was invited to give the plenary address at the annual conference of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew.
His brother was Mark Steiner, Professor of Philosophy at Hebrew University, who died from the coronavirus in 2020.
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