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
Moabite and Hebrew
(1,734 words)
Moabite belongs to the Northwest branch of the Semitic languages (Northwest Semitic Languages and Hebrew) and, along with Phoenician and Punic, Hebrew, Ammonite, and Edomite, is classified as ‘Canaanite’ (Canaanite and Hebrew). Of the Canaanite languages, Moabite is most closely related to Hebrew (Garr 1985:229). Rainey (2007) sees Hebrew and Moabite as Transjordanian languages within Canaanite. Segert argued that the similarity between the two languages stems from the possibility that the Mesha…
Modern Hebrew: Features of the Spoken Language
(3,572 words)
The discipline of Hebrew grammar that came into being in the Middle Ages analyzed and described the rules governing classical written Hebrew texts. Since then Hebrew grammar has retained its close connection to the written language; in fact, to this day the overwhelming majority of the concepts available to students of Hebrew grammar, in particular of syntax, derive from the traditional study of the grammar and syntax of written Hebrew. It is therefore hardly surprising that linguists’ mental ha…
Modern Hebrew Grammar: History of Scholarship
(5,047 words)
Linguistic research on Modern Hebrew has been relatively slow to adopt 20th-century theories and approaches in general linguistics. One of the main reasons for this delay lies in the fact that Hebrew only began to be used as a vernacular towards the end of the 19th century, and during the speech community’s formative period, the distinctiveness of contemporary usage was not self-evident. Grammarians’ main aim at the time was to disseminate Hebrew according to the classical models. Their concerns…
Modern Hebrew: Language Varieties
(10,228 words)
Like any other living language, Modern Hebrew (MH) has many varieties depending on numerous sociological, geographical, textual, temporal, and personal factors. They are determined by the classical question: who uses (speaks, writes) what variety of what language to whom, when, where, and concerning what (based on Fishman 1972:2). In this entry the use of text refers to any variety of language usage, in conventional writing, in speech, in media usages, on the internet, etc. The survey will conce…
Modern Hebrew: The Language of Literature
(2,505 words)
This entry deals with the language of both modern poetry and modern prose from two main aspects, stylistics and style, on the one hand, and literary discourse, on the other. The one main feature that is common to all literary texts is
poetic license (Leech 1969; Ephratt 1996), which is the permission given those who compose literary texts to make up new words
ad hoc, either using the language’s normal derivational rules or innovating in other ways, to purposely distort phrases and words, to deviate from the timeline, to mix times, to mix registers, and so on…
Modern Jewish Aramaic, Hebrew Component in
(722 words)
Like any other Jewish language (Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, etc.) Jewish Neo-Aramaic includes loanwords from Hebrew. These account for approximately six percent of the total of loans in the language. Of course, this ratio changes depending on whether the speaker is a
Hakham ‘a learned person in Judaism’, and on the subject matter, such as midrashic-halakhic discourse. Most of these loanwords are from post-biblical Hebrew, i.e., Jewish law, midrashim, prayers, Jewish folktales, etc. The major sources for this entry are words from the Jewish…
Mood and Modality: Biblical Hebrew
(1,961 words)
Tense, aspect, and modality comprise an interrelated complex of linguistic features (abbreviated tam or tma; Tense: Biblical Hebrew; Aspect: Pre-Modern Hebrew; Aspectual Markers) that merit focused research. Broadly defined, ‘modality’ denotes the communication of potential states-of-affairs or of illocutionary force. Languages typically express modality through distinct verb morphologies known as grammatical ‘moods’; modal adverbs, conjunctions, or particles; auxiliary verbs; specific lexemes; set expressions; clause-level cues; and …
Mood and Modality: Modern Hebrew
(5,089 words)
The category of Mood, like that of Modality, is related to the distinction between actual, i.e., real or factual, states of affairs and those which are not actual. From a general cross-linguistic perspective, Mood is sometimes taken to be a subtype of Modality, and is more readily associated with morphological inflection on the verb (Palmer 2001). 1. Mood In Modern Hebrew, four types of mood (Hebrew דרך
derex) can be distinguished, mainly on syntactic grounds: the indicative, the imperative, the optative/subjunctive (volitive), and the conditional moods (Verbal System: Modern H…
Mood and Modality: Rabbinic Hebrew
(2,061 words)
1. Introduction ‘Mood’ is a morphological category associated with verbs; it may depend on the type of clause (as in subordination) or may be used to express the speaker’s attitude towards an action (desire, command, uncertainty, etc.) or a realistic view of the facts (Rosén 1967:995–996). This attitude may also be expressed lexically or syntactically (for example, with adverbs, auxiliary verbs, word order, and so on). The term ‘modality’ thus denotes all the available ways for expressing a speaker’s attitude towards an act (Brunot 1936:513…
Morocco, Pronunciation Traditions
(3,175 words)
1. Introduction In Morocco children at a very young age attended Torah schools, usually situated in the synagogue (
s-sla). The pupils in these schools received a traditional religious education and acquired basic reading and writing skills. The most important task which the teachers set for themselves was transmission of the correct pronunciation of the text; students who erred in reading were corrected (Bar-Asher 2008). The Hebrew pronunciation tradition among the Jews of Morocco belongs to the Sephardi group, whose origins go back to the Palestinian pronun…
Morphology: Biblical Hebrew
(9,195 words)
Introduction In presenting the morphology of Biblical Hebrew (BH), in the main we refer to Standard Judahite literary Hebrew, i.e., the literary variety used in Judah ca. 1000–600 B.C.E. (for an earlier treatment, on which the present entry is largely based, see Rendsburg 2007). Where the data permit us to witness distinct usages in other varieties of ancient Hebrew, such will be noted. Thus, we will refer occasionally to archaic Biblical Hebrew (ABH); Israelian Hebrew (IH), that is, the dialect …
Morphology in the Medieval Karaite Grammatical Tradition
(3,653 words)
In the Middle Ages the Karaites developed a tradition of Hebrew grammatical thought that differed in some fundamental ways from the system of Hebrew grammar that was adopted by contemporary Rabbanite grammarians. The corpus of Karaite grammatical texts that have come down to us can be classified broadly into two main groups, which we shall refer to respectively as the early tradition and the tradition associated with the grammarian ʾAbū al-Faraj Hārūn (Grammarians: Karaite). 1. The Early Tradition The main source of our knowledge for the early tradition of Karaite grammat…
Morphology in the Medieval Rabbanite Grammatical Tradition
(7,449 words)
Morphology constituted the core of Hebrew grammar in the Middle Ages and was usually presented together with issues of syntax and phonology. In their chapters on morphology grammarians discussed declensions, noun, verb, and particle paradigms, grammatical terminology, and the classification of morphological categories, including lists of independent pronouns, tenses, conjugation patterns, and derivational patterns. Some also composed conjugation tables and undertook statistical counts of forms. Words were first studied and analyzed for didactic purposes. Anal…
Morphology: Modern Hebrew
(3,578 words)
Modern Hebrew morphology is based on classical, mainly Biblical Hebrew, albeit with many changes, some related to word structure (the lexicon), others due to morphophonemic and morphosyntactic factors. Hence the discussion here will concentrate on derivational and inflectional processes that are specific to Modern Hebrew morphology (Schwarzwald 2009a). 1. Derivational Morphology Except for acronyms, all the word formation devices in Modern Hebrew are based on the classical sources and are already found in Biblical Hebrew. They include root-and-p…
Morphology: Rabbinic Hebrew
(4,722 words)
1. Independent Pronouns singular plural 1c אני
ʾani אנו
ʾanu 2m אתה
ʾatta אתם
ʾattem את
at אתן
ʾatten 2f את
ʾat אתם
ʾattem אתן
ʾatten 3m הוא
hu הם, הן
hem, hen 3f היא
hi הן
hen Comments
1cs. Of the two biblical pronouns אָנֹכִי
ʾå̄nōḵī and אֲנִי
ʾănī, the use of the former decreases in Late Biblical Hebrew and in Rabbinic Hebrew (RH) disappears altogether (except for citations to the Bible).
2ms. The short form appears rarely in the Masoretic Text (e.g., Num. 11.15), whereas it is very widespread in reliable manuscripts of RH. In the printed editions of the Mishna it …
Multiliteral Roots
(1,341 words)
The term ‘multiliteral root’ presupposes the reality in Hebrew of consonantal roots, i.e., of basic, discontinuous, lexical morphemes in Hebrew grammar (Root). Multiliteral roots are such morphemes that contain more than three consonants (i.e., quadrilateral or quinquiliteral roots). The combination of such a discontinuous morpheme and specific vocalic patterns form fixed templates from which Hebrew words are derived (McCarthy 1981). Since the root morpheme operates for verbs and deverbal nominal formations, purely nominal multiliteral units (e.g., צפרדע
ṣfardeaʿ ‘frog’, ה…