Professor Gene B Gragg's unbounded intellectual curiosity and rigorous linguistic method have served as a bridge between the often disparate fields of Semitic philology and linguistics, between the various sub-disciplines that study the ancient Near East, between the study of ancient languages by means of scribal corpora and modern languages by means of language helpers, and between users and developers of computer programs for linguistic and text analysis. In so doing he has inspired a generation of students and colleagues to new vistas and greater horizons. All but one of the essays in this volume were originally presented at a symposium at the Oriental Institute on May 21-22, 2004, in honour of his retirement. The symposium was centered around Semitic and comparative Semitic linguistics, the areas of inquiry of most of Professor Gragg's students; two other papers at the symposium (those by Bender and Militarev) directed our attention to his comparative Afroasiatic interests. An additional paper by Rebecca Hasselbach, who was recently hired to teach Comparative Semitics at the Oriental Institute, rounds off the volume. Table of Contents Foreword. Gil J. Stein; Preface. Cynthia L. Miller; The Research of Gene B. Gragg. Cynthia L. Miller; Bibliography of the Publications and Communications of Gene B. Gragg. Charles E. Jones; Gene B. Gragg as a Teacher. Robert D. Hoberman; Dissertation Committee Service. Gene B. Gragg; Chapter 1. The Afrasian Lexicon Reconsidered. M. Lionel Bender; Chapter 2. PQD Revisited. Stuart Creason; Chapter 3. May the Gods Preserve You! The Variability of Injunctive *la in Epigraphic South Arabian and Its Relation to Jussive Forms within South Semitic. Joseph L. Daniels II; Chapter 4. Littera ex occidente: Toward a Functional History of Writing. Peter T. Daniels; Chapter 5. The Story of Mem u Zine in the Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Bohtan. Samuel Ethan Fox; Chapter 6. Prenasalization in Aramaic. W. Randall Garr; Chapter 7. A New Masoretic "Spell Checker" or, a Practical Method for Checking the Accentual Structure and Integrity of Tiberian-Pointed Biblical Texts. Richard L. Goerwitz III; Chapter 8. External Plural Markers in Semitic: A New Assessment. Rebecca Hasselbach; Chapter 9. Semitic Triradicality or Prosodic Minimality? Evidence from Sound Change. Robert D. Hoberman; Chapter 10. Akkadian-Egyptian Lexical Matches. Alexander Militarev; Chapter 11. Constraints on Ellipsis in Biblical Hebrew. Cynthia L. Miller; Chapter 12. The Ugaritic Alphabetic Cuneiform Writing System in the Context of Other Alphabetic Systems. Dennis Pardee; Chapter 13. West Semitic Perspectives on the Akkadian Vetitive. David Testen; Index.