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
Jubilees, Hebrew of
(945 words)
The book of
Jubilees, composed in the 2nd century B.C.E., belongs to a genre known as ‘rewritten Bible’, which was widespread during the Second Temple period. It reworks the narratives of Genesis 1 to Exodus 12, highlighting legal implications of the retold events. It is a peculiar feature of Jubilees that the events narrated in it are meticulously dated and interpreted in accordance with a chronological framework based on units of seven years (called ‘weeks’) and jubilees. Jubilees was originally composed in Hebrew, and soon thereafter translated into Greek, thence to C…
Judeo-Alsatian, Hebrew Component in
(642 words)
Judeo-Alsatian is a peripheral form of Western Yiddish (Zuckerman 1969) in a Low Alemannic dialectal area. It was spoken in the Alsatian countryside until approximately 1930, and (scarce) documentation on the language goes back to the 18th century. Alsatian Jews led a traditional and very pious way of life, which may explain the many
Kulturwörter from the realm of religion in their language. However, these words were adapted to the specific Alsatian tradition of pronouncing the ‘holy tongue’ (see below) in Alsace, as well as to the specific phoneti…
Judeo-Arabic, Egyptian, Hebrew Component in
(1,103 words)
Hebrew is the main component in the vocabulary of spoken Egyptian Judeo-Arabic that is distinct from the vocabulary of the Egyptian Arabic spoken by non-Jews. Some elements have also been used in written texts. Most words and phrases retain their original Hebrew forms and meanings. For example רַע
raʿ, pl. רָעִים
raʿim ‘bad, an evil person’; לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד
le-ʿolam va-ʿed ‘forever and ever’; נֵס
nes ‘miracle’; יְרֵא שָׁמַיִם
yere šamayim ‘God-fearing’. The articulation of the consonants ק
q and פ plosive
p is influenced by Egyptian Arabic. The consonant ק
q is usually pronounced as a g…
Judeo-Arabic Influence on the Emergence of Registers in Modern Hebrew
(1,149 words)
It is a well-known fact that spoken languages possess, among other types of variety, social and geographical dialects and that social and geographical divisions often overlap. An examination of Israelis who live in the country’s social and geographical periphery, i.e., those living outside the major cities, reveals an interesting, though unsurprising fact: the state of diglossia between various Jewish languages and Modern Hebrew and the effects of this diglossia are an important factor influenci…
Judeo-Arabic, Iraqi, Hebrew Component in
(1,263 words)
1. General Dialectologically, the Arabic of all the Jews of Iraq belonged to the
qəltu group. From a macro point of view, these Arabic dialects were divided into three main groups: the Mosul group in the north of Iraq, the Baghdadi group in the center and south, and the ʿĀna group near the Syrian border in the west. All the Judeo-Arabic dialects east of Iraq, namely in India and at other trading posts in the Far East, belonged to the Baghdadi group. Accordingly, there were differences between these main group…
Judeo-Arabic, Libya, Hebrew Component in
(2,641 words)
1. Introduction In the Arabic dialect of the Jews of Tripoli (Libya) the following Hebrew elements have been identified in fieldwork carried out by S. Yoda between 1996 and 2000:
ʿīnārə́ʿ (< עֵין הָרַע
ʿēn hå̄-rå̄ʿ) ‘evil eye’,
bdəq (< בָּדַק
bå̄ḏaq) ‘to check’,
bəsxū́č (< בִּזְכוּת
bi-zḵūṯ) ‘thanks to’,
brāxā́ (< בְּרָכָה
bərå̄ḵå̄) ‘blessing’,
būrī́m (< פּוּרִים
pūrīm) ‘Purim’,
čānā́x (< תַּנַ״ך
tanaḵ) ‘the Bible’,
čfəllī́m (< תְּפִלִּין
təp̄illīn) ‘Bar Mitzvah’,
čfənnə́q (< הִתְפַּנֵּק
hiṯpannēq) ‘to be spoiled’,
čkəwwə́n (< הִתְכַּוֵּן
hiṯkawwēn) ‘to intend’,
dāwī́d (< דָּוִד
då̄wīḏ) ‘King Da…
Judeo-Arabic, Medieval, Hebrew Component in
(754 words)
Medieval Judeo-Arabic is written in Middle Arabic, a language in which Classical Arabic (or, to be precise, the developed form of the classical language designated by Fischer 1972 as ‘post-Classical Arabic’), Neo-Arabic and pseudo-correct elements alternate quite freely. Moreover, Hebrew (and Aramaic) words, phrases, and even whole passages are interspersed within the Arabic texts. Yet even in those (as a rule Talmudic) documents in which the Hebrew elements quantitatively outweigh the Arabic on…
Judeo-Arabic, North Africa, Hebrew Component in
(2,796 words)
Most Jewish communities in the four countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) possessed dialects of Judeo-Arabic that differed from those of their Muslim neighbors. In many cases the differences between the Jewish and Muslim dialects concerned grammar and lexicon, for example the pronunciation of the consonant /
q/ in Arabic in the Tafilalt region of Morocco, which was pronounced [q] by some Muslims and [g] by others, while the Jews pronounced it [k], e.g., in Muslim Arabic [bəqra] or [bəgra], as opposed to Judeo-Arabic [b…
Judeo-Arabic, Syria, Hebrew Component in
(626 words)
1. The Judeo-Arabic Dialects of Syria Arabic is spoken today by Jews in Syria’s two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo. The communities are very small, numbering fewer than one-hundred people each. Arabic is also spoken in the former Syrian province of Iskenderun, which was ceded to Turkey in 1939 and became the Turkish province of Hatay. The small Arabic-speaking community of Iskenderun existed until 1998. In Antakya (Antioch), the capital city of Hatay, there are today fewer than one-hundred Jewish…
Judeo-Arabic, Yemen, Hebrew Component in
(2,575 words)
1. Knowledge of Hebrew in Yemen Yemenite Jews have a reputation for extraordinary competence in Hebrew. Outsiders are often impressed by their proficiency in reading, writing and even active speaking. However, this is by no means true of
all Yemenite Jews in
all Yemenite communities. According to Goitein’s card catalogue (described in Goitein 1953), the Jews of Yemen dwelled in more than a thousand different localities throughout this vast country, some in cohesive communities, others as just a few families in an isolated Muslim village…
Judeo-French, Hebrew component in
(990 words)
The Jewish communities of medieval Northern France produced an extensive Old French textual tradition in Hebrew script extending from the second half of the 11th century to the 14th century. While the linguistic variety of these texts is commonly referred to as ‘Judeo-French’, it should be noted that the principal feature differentiating it from varieties of Old French found in Christian texts is its writing system: there is no evidence of the existence of a distinct Jewish language in medieval France. Judeo-French literature can be divided into two categories: (1) …
Judeo-Georgian, Hebrew Component in
(707 words)
Jews have lived in Georgia for more than two-thousand years, and have spoken Georgian since the earliest times, although they continued using Hebrew for religious purposes. Jews settled in compact groups in the Georgian towns and villages and their speech possesses the features of the local dialects. However, there are a number of characteristic idiosyncrasies in the speech of Georgian Jews: (a) One such characteristic is a special intonation, a prolongation of the last vowel in an interrogative sentence, e.g.,
šen izam ma sakmēs ‘will you do this thing’? (b) There is also a s…
Judeo-Greek, Hebrew Component in
(614 words)
The literary and documentary texts of the Hellenistic period show that the Semitic languages spoken by Jews influenced their Greek. The Jewish population that spoke Greek must have preserved the Hebraisms in their speech. The evidence from the Byzantine period is insufficient, but it is not improbable that the number of Hebrew loanwords grew as a result of the increasing influence of Rabbinic Judaism. During the medieval and early modern eras, the Hebrew component of Judeo-Greek underwent substa…
Judeo-Italian, Hebrew Component in
(776 words)
Judeo-Italian texts belong to two distinct categories: older religious texts, generally translations from Hebrew, and 20th-century poems and plays which reflect the colloquial language. The two categories of texts are not linked by a common writing tradition. 1. Older Texts These texts, translations of prayers and books of the Bible dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, are all written in the Hebrew alphabet, and are typically vocalized. They contain relatively few words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin, mainly religious terms. The word or…
Judeo-Malayalam, Hebrew Component in
(1,816 words)
Malayalam is an agglutinative Dravidian language spoken in Kerala (South India). The history of the Jews in Kerala goes back approximately one-thousand years, during which they developed their own Malayalam dialect, Judeo-Malayalam. Since their mass migration to Israel in the early 1950s the use of this dialect has considerably declined. The Hebrew component in Judeo-Malayalam is found in three types of sources: Judeo-Malayalam literature (15th–20th centuries) preserved in notebooks (19th–20th centuries), verbatim translations of sacred texts p…
Judeo-Persian, Hebrew Component in
(2,600 words)
Judeo-Persian has a relatively small Hebrew component, showing a low level of fusion. The term Judeo-Persian (JP) refers to a group of very similar, usually mutually comprehensible dialects of Persian, spoken or written by Jews in greater Iran over a period of more than a millennium. JP is documented only in its New Persian (NP) stage, although there is indirect evidence of Jewish Middle Persian as well (Shapira 2001). JP roughly divides into two periods: pre-Mongol Judeo-Persian, known as Early Judeo-Persia…
Judeo-Portuguese, Hebrew Component in
(971 words)
Judeo-Portuguese is the now-extinct Luso-Romance language attested in a small number of texts written in Hebrew script, all dating from the 15th century and earlier, as well as a larger number of post-15th-century Roman-letter texts, all produced in émigré communities outside the Iberian peninsula. The Hebrew component in peninsular Judeo-Portuguese takes the form of lexical borrowing, syntactic peculiarities, and adaptations of orthographic conventions. Émigré Judeo-Portuguese also contains a number of Hebrew loanwords for items relating to Jewish life (e.g.,
jesiba ‘reli…
Judeo-Provençal, Hebrew Component in
(943 words)
The dialect of the Jews of Provence (Judeo-Provençal) is attested in a variety of sources. As with Judeo-Italian (Judeo-Italian, Hebrew Component in), there are older texts written in the Hebrew alphabet with a very minimal Hebrew component, and there is later evidence for the spoken language from texts written in the Latin alphabet. 1. The Written Language Among the older written texts there are a word-for-word translation of the daily prayers from the 14th or 15th century (Roth Manuscript 32) and a free, rhyming translation of the book of Esther fro…
Judeo-Slavic, Hebrew Component in
(621 words)
Judeo-Slavic, the language(s) of the Slavic-speaking Jews who lived in Eastern Europe before the arrival of the Ashkenazim at the end of the Middle Ages, has been completely absorbed by Yiddish, the language of the newcomers. The only way to reconstruct Judeo-Slavic is to analyze the Slavic component of Eastern Yiddish, a language which is probably the result of the encounter between immigrants from Germany and local Slavic-speaking Jews. It is therefore very difficult to identify the Hebrew component of the extinct Judeo-Slavic, a language which may not have dif…
Judeo-Spanish Influence on Hebrew
(2,125 words)
Judeo-Spanish (JS), also known as Ladino, Djudezmo, or Español, is the language spoken since the 16th century by the Jews expelled from Spain who settled in the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and in North Africa. Its basic grammatical structure and vocabulary follow medieval Spanish, with massive influence from Hebrew and local languages, such as Greek, Turkish, Arabic, French, and Italian. The first paragraphs of this entry describe JS from a number of perspectives, and and then the influence of JS on Modern Hebrew will be discussed. 1. Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish Hebrew and…