FOUNDED 1842
On behalf of the American Oriental Society, the selection committee announces that it has awarded the Jonas Greenfield Prize For Younger Semitists to Martin Worthington, the University of Cambridge.
The American Oriental Society honors the memory of eminent Semitist and American Oriental Society member, Jonas C. Greenfield (October 30, 1926--March 13, 1995). The Greenfield Prize carries a cash award of $3000, and is granted every three years to a younger scholar for the best article in any area of Semitic studies that has been published during the most recent two-year period.
The current competition for the Greenfield Prize covers the period from June 2006 through May 2008. According to the stipulations of the donor, candidates for the current competition were forty years old or younger by June 1, 2008.
The selection committee hereby awards the Jonas Greenfield Prize For Younger Semitists to Martin Worthington, Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, for his article "“Dialect admixture of Babylonian and Assyrian in SAA VIII, X, XII, XVII and XVIII,"” published in the journal Iraq, vol. 68 (2006) pp. 59–84.
Worthington's important scholarly contribution sheds light on the variables determining the sociolinguistic mechanisms of code-switching that lie behind the occurrence of Babylonian features in Neo-Assyrian texts, as well as that of Assyrianisms in Neo-Babylonian letters.
The Greenfield Prize Committee
Prof. Stephen Kaufman, Chair (Hebrew Union College)
Prof. Dennis Pardee (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)
Prof. Gonzalo Rubio, ANE Chair of the AOS (Pennsylvania State University)