Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics
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Subject: Language And Linguistics
Edited by: Geoffrey Khan
Associate editors: Shmuel Bolozky, Steven Fassberg, Gary A. Rendsburg, Aaron D. Rubin, Ora R. Schwarzwald, Tamar Zewi
The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online offers a systematic and comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the history and study of the Hebrew language from its earliest attested form to the present day.
The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online features advanced search options, as well as extensive cross-references and full-text search functionality using the Hebrew character set. With over 850 entries and approximately 400 contributing scholars, the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online is the authoritative reference work for students and researchers in the fields of Hebrew linguistics, general linguistics, Biblical studies, Hebrew and Jewish literature, and related fields.
Subscriptions: Brill.com
Associate editors: Shmuel Bolozky, Steven Fassberg, Gary A. Rendsburg, Aaron D. Rubin, Ora R. Schwarzwald, Tamar Zewi
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The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online offers a systematic and comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the history and study of the Hebrew language from its earliest attested form to the present day.
The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online features advanced search options, as well as extensive cross-references and full-text search functionality using the Hebrew character set. With over 850 entries and approximately 400 contributing scholars, the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online is the authoritative reference work for students and researchers in the fields of Hebrew linguistics, general linguistics, Biblical studies, Hebrew and Jewish literature, and related fields.
Subscriptions: Brill.com
Chiasmus
(954 words)
Chiasmus is a poetic device in which the elements of two successive parallel structures are in reverse order. Schematically, this can be set out as abc // c′b′a′, where a, b, and c are grammatical elements (verb—noun—noun) within a line, with their corresponding variants a′, b′, and c′. For example, וְיִמָּלְא֣וּ אֲסָמֶ֣יךָ שָׂבָ֑ע // ותְִ֝יר֗שׁוֹ יְקָבֶ֥יךָ יִפְרֹֽצוּ (a)
wə-yimmå̄lʾū (b)
ʾăså̄mεḵå̄ (c)
śå̄ḇå̄ʿ // (c′)
wə-tīrōš (b′)
yəqå̄bεḵå̄ (a′)
yip̄rōṣū ‘Filled will your granaries be with plenty, and with wine will your vats overflow’ (Prov. 3.10). In the Bible a complete chiasmus…
Child Language
(3,371 words)
Language acquisition is, by far, the child’s most important cognitive achievement in infancy and childhood, underlying almost all communicative, social, and psychological ability (Gillis and Ravid 2003). The present entry discusses a number of key psycholinguistic terms relating to child language acquisition, with particular reference to Hebrew. 1. Approaches to Language Acquisition Unlike foreign language learning, first language acquisition generally happens naturally, successfully, and with relatively few errors, despite the incomplete and oft…
Children’s Literature
(2,907 words)
Children’s literature has existed for a relatively short time, and has played a significant role in education only since the 19th century (though examples of children’s literature in Europe have been documented as early as the 17th century, because that is when such literature began to be written, specifically in Germany). But these were only preliminary attempts to bring this type of literature to the attention of the broader public. It was only during that period that children began to be perc…
China
(1,659 words)
There is no evidence that classical Hebrew was ever used in China as a living language. It has, however, been used as a liturgical language among Jewish communities in China. In addition, Judeo-Persian documents, written in the Hebrew script, have been found along the Silk Road, evidence of Jewish merchants travelling to China. The earliest written sources that mention Jews in China are in Arabic (Leslie 1998:49–51). Jewish and Russian traders, the Radhânites, visited China in the 9th century C.E. Jews were among the many foreigners said to have b…
Christian Hebraists: Medieval Period
(8,999 words)
1. Introduction The study of the Hebrew language and Jewish literature as undertaken by Christian scholars during the Middle Ages has been the subject of several modern works. This modern scholarship has often expressed a rather negative opinion of the achievements of medieval Christian Hebraists, contrasting them with the subsequent development of Hebrew studies during the Renaissance. However, recent studies of original manuscripts have revealed a hitherto unsuspected level of knowledge and impo…
Christian Hebraists: Pre-Modern Period
(2,182 words)
The 16th century saw a flourishing of Hebrew grammatical study among Christians. Early Christian Hebraists, though, were quite reliant on Jewish teachers, and much of their work was heavily indebted to earlier Jewish authors. In the 17th century, however, Christian authors began to come into their own, developing the field in new ways. At the same time, for various social and political reasons, the study of Hebrew grammar became rather stagnant among Jews. Thus the 16th century witnessed a real …
Christian Hebraists: Renaissance Period
(6,136 words)
The first half of the 16th century is considered the blossoming age of Christian Hebraism; the first grammars and lexica of the Hebrew language appeared in print during this period, and the knowledge of the language enjoyed unprecedented popularity among Christian scholars. This growth in interest has been linked by some historians to an unparalleled change in the attitude of Christian scholarly elites toward Judaism—from hostility and mistrust to a new spirit of ‘humanistic’ collaboration and e…
Circumstantial Clause
(1,284 words)
A circumstantial clause is a clause providing ‘background information’ on an occurrence described by another clause—more precisely, on the state or qualities of the participants involved in a given event or situation, their position or actions at the time of the occurrence, etc. Circumstantial clauses are closely related to other types of adverbial clauses (Adverbial)—mainly Temporal Clauses, Causal Clauses, and Concession Clauses—from which they cannot always be clearly distinguished. An extens…
Classicism: Biblical Hebrew
(653 words)
The vocabulary and grammar of Biblical Hebrew are remarkably constant, especially when one considers that the biblical texts must have come into being over a period of at least five-hundred (and possibly as much as one-thousand) years. To some extent, this constancy may reflect the fact that languages change slowly. But in the case of Biblical Hebrew there is an additional factor as well: after the Babylonian exile, when large parts of what was to become the biblical corpus had acquired a measur…
Cleft Sentences
(2,849 words)
The term ‘cleft sentence’ was first introduced by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen. He used this term for sentences of the pattern ‘It is
x who/which/that
y’—in which
y is a substantivized relative clause (or a content clause) (Relative Clause; Content Clause; Noun Clauses), and
x is not the antecedent of that clause (Jespersen 1909–1949: III 88–89; VII 147–149; 1937:73–79). In the following discussion, five basic patterns of cleft sentences will be presented (for a broader understanding of the scope of cleft sentences, which allows the inclusion of ad…
Clitics: Pre-Modern Hebrew
(3,180 words)
‘Clitic’ (from Greek κλίνειν ‘incline, lean’) is the term in traditional grammar for a word that cannot bear primary word stress and thus ‘leans’ on an adjacent stress-bearing word (the ‘clitic host’). A clitic leaning on a following word is a ‘proclitic’; one leaning on a preceding word is an ‘enclitic’. Clitics exhibit characteristics of both words and affixes and yet do not fall fully into either category: they are “like single-word syntactic constituents in that they function as heads, argum…