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
Nominal Clause
(6,737 words)
1. Introduction Narrowly defined, clauses are nominal if their predicate is a noun and not a verb. A broader definition regards any clause whose predicate is any part of speech other than a verb as a nominal clause. Such a predicate can be a noun, an adjective, an adverb, a particle, a prepositional phrase, or even a certain type of clause. In line with this definition, nominal clauses are also called ‘non-verbal’ or ‘verbless’ clauses. The latter term implies an analysis according to which a copu…
Nominalization: Biblical Hebrew
(651 words)
In the Hebrew Bible various parts of speech can function syntactically as nouns. Prepositions, prepositional phrases, finite verbs, relative clauses, phrases, adverbs, and particles may serve as nouns while retaining their original part-of-speech forms. These relatively less common occurrences are all manifestations of what is called ‘nominalization’. Recognition of the existence of nominalization can lead to new understandings of some long-held grammatical concepts. For example, the general rule that the construct state represe…
Nominalization: Modern Hebrew
(1,226 words)
A ‘nominalization’ is a linguistic expression that encapsulates a proposition in a noun-like form, ready to be inserted in a syntactic slot prototypically reserved for nouns. Modern Hebrew has four nominalization constructions: (1) Action noun (שם פעולה
šem peʿula): e.g., שבירה
švira ‘breaking’; העשרה
haʿašara ‘enriching’ (Rosén 1962:256–259). Coffin and Bolozky (2005:47) use ‘verbal noun’, but also ‘gerund’ (Coffin and Bolozky 2005:287). (2) Gerund (מקור נטוי
maqor naṭuy ‘inflected infinitive’ or ‘infinitive construct’): e.g., הגיע-
hagiʿ - in בהגיעו
be-hagiʿo ‘in/upon hi…
Non-Sentential Utterances
(1,814 words)
Language in general, and spoken language in particular, abounds with syntactically incomplete utterances, that is, utterances in which not all the words necessary to express the complete idea are actually produced. A complete utterance makes reference to the topic being talked about as well as to what is being said about the topic, in other words, to both theme and rheme, and also other essential constituents. Some incomplete utterances are ‘truncated’, that is, they are produced contrary to plan, for example: ? … גם אתה רוצה
gam ʾata roṣe? ‘you also want …?’ (The mother was going …
Non-Western Bible Translations
(1,213 words)
Even though parts of the Bible have been translated into thousands of languages all over the world, the number of languages that have a translation of the entire Hebrew Bible is relatively small. According to the figures provided by the United Bible Societies, the entire Bible, including both the Old and New Testaments, has been translated into approximately 470 languages. This situation usually reflects the policies of the translation agencies involved. The New Testament is often translated fir…
Normativism
(3,508 words)
1. Introduction The normative, or prescriptive, view of language maintains that one variety of a language has an inherently higher value than others, and that this ought to be imposed on the whole of the speech community (Crystal 1997:2). Such a language variety is perceived by its adherents as ‘correct’. The normative language is often defined in terms of the rules of the classical language (Schwarzwald 1999:383). It will often differ from the ‘standard’ language, that is, from the linguistic str…
Northwest Semitic Languages and Hebrew
(8,357 words)
1. The Emergence of Hebrew Brockelmann’s ‘Northwest Semitic’ (NWS) language group originally consisted of Canaanite and Aramaic, in contradistinction to Arabic and Ethiopic in the Southwest (1908:6), but is now often subsumed together with Arabic under ‘Central Semitic’ (Huehnergard 2005;
contra Blau 1978; Lipiński 2001:§4.1–4.6). Inscriptions in diverse Syro-Palestinian languages have improved our diachronic view of the biblical text transmitted in its traditional garb by scribes, and the background against which Hebrew had acquired …
Noun
(3,421 words)
The nouns of Modern Hebrew (MH) and Biblical Hebrew (BH) can be divided into two major classes: templatic and non-templatic. A noun is templatic if it can be decomposed into a root and a template (syllable structure+ vocalization+affixes;
Mishqal ). For this to be possible, either the root or the template has to be independently recognizable. For example, the very productive template
qiṭ(ṭ)ul can be recognized in סיכוי
sikuy ‘risk’, by analogy with nouns like סיכון
sikun ‘danger’ or דיכוי
dikuy ‘oppression’, even though this is the only occurrence of the root סכ״י
s-k-y in the language …
Noun Clauses
(3,031 words)
A substantival clause is a simple sentence occupying a nominal-substantival position within a larger, more complex sentence. The notion of such clauses stems from the understanding of the sxple sentence as the basic syntactic pattern. The complex sentence results from the elaboration (or complication) of one of its non-verbal parts. In the process of such an elaboration, a simple sentence (henceforward referred to as a ‘clause’) occupies the position of a nominal part (a noun or noun phrase) of …
Noun Phrase
(3,629 words)
This entry deals with Noun Phrases in current Israeli Hebrew from two perspectives: their syntactic structure and function (Section 1) and their use in extended discourse (Section 2). Focus is on Hebrew-specific properties, against the background of linguistic research on Noun Phrases in different languages, including: Andrews’ (2007) survey of the major semantic roles and grammatical functions associated with Noun Phrases; Giorgi and Longobardi’s (1991) overview of the internal structure of Nou…
Nouns, Acquisition of
(1,622 words)
Nouns are content words that refer to people, places, objects, or abstract notions. In the sentence they can function as the subject or the object of a verb or as part of a prepositional phrase. Nouns in Hebrew may be inflected for gender (e.g., masculine ילד
yeled ‘boy’, feminine ילדה
yalda ‘girl’) and number (e.g., singular חודש
x̱odeš ‘month’, plural חודשים
x̱odašim ‘months’, and, rarely, dual חודשיים
x̱odšayim ‘two-months’). By default the noun’s plural suffix accords with its gender (e.g., ילדים
yeladim ‘boys’, ילדות
yeladot ‘girls’). Hebrew nouns also get bound genitive f…
Nouns of Mass
(819 words)
In a great number of languages around the world nouns may be categorized as either mass or count. Being one or the other, they show different syntactic and semantic properties cross-linguistically. Hebrew mass nouns have the syntactic properties listed in (1). (1) (a) no plural morphology (b) no numerals (c) need for classifier/measure phrases to be quantified These properties are illustrated in (2)–(4) below, where the (a) and (b) sentences exemplify mass and count nouns, respectively. (2a) ביגודים זולים יותר בקיץ* *
bigudim zolim yoter ba-qayiṣ clothing-pl cheap-mpl more in-the…
Null Arguments
(1,198 words)
The terms ‘null argument’, ‘missing argument’, and ‘argument ellipsis’ refer to the omission from a clause of one or more of three types of nominals required by the main verb: the surface Subject, the Direct Object, and/or the Indirect Object. For example, אני) נתתי לרינה את הספר) [Subject:
ʾani = Ø]
natati le-rina ʾet ha-sefer ‘(I) gave the book to Rina’; (דן סיפר לי (סיפור
dan siper li [Direct Object:
sipur = Ø] ‘Dan told me (a story)’; (דן שלח את המכתב (לרינה
dan šalax̱ ʾet ha-mixtav [Indirect Object:
le-Rina = Ø] ‘Dan sent the letter (to Rina)’. In languages in which argument omis…
Number and Gender of God in Non-Western Bible Translations
(2,518 words)
One of the key issues in the history of Bible translation is the manner by which the Hebrew concept of God, expressed through various names and epithets in the original, is conveyed in the target language. This entry deals with the question of how contemporary non-Western Bible translations, in their efforts to translate the Hebrew Bible, deal with the concept of God, and how the linguistic concepts of grammatical number and gender play a role in this discussion. 1. God and Number As far as number is concerned, Biblical Hebrew distinguishes between singular, dual, and plural.…
Number: Biblical Hebrew
(1,324 words)
1. Overview Biblical Hebrew nouns display three degrees of numerical inflection: singular, plural, and dual, the latter limited to specific noun classes. Adjectives, verbs, pronouns, both independent and pronominal, as well as the demonstrative pronouns, display only two: singular and plural. 2. Morphology Early Northwest Semitic languages, as well as other Semitic languages attested in the second millennium B.C.E., had a fully inflected declension system for the nouns. It is thus thought that the paleo-Hebrew endings were singular
-u, dual
-ā, and plural
-ū in the nominative,…
Number: Modern Hebrew
(3,197 words)
Number refers here to the morphological and syntactic features of words in the language which semantically relate to quantity (Corbett 2000:9–53). The most essential expression of number appears in nouns, because they determine the syntactic agreement in the sentence. As will be demonstrated below, number is realized morphologically in other parts of speech in addition to nouns. Modern Hebrew number inflection and derivation are based on those of Classical Hebrew, though with some developments. Each of the following categories has number marking. In most cases the mar…
Number: Rabbinic Hebrew
(1,861 words)
This entry deals mainly with the endings on substantives, i.e., nouns, adjectives, and participles, though a few comments on demonstratives and verbs are included at the end. 1. Plural Endings The plural endings are ים-
-im and ות-
-ot. There are no other plural endings, and these endings are even attached to loanwords, e.g., אפיקורוסים
ʾappiqorosim ‘heretics’ (from the Greek proper name ̓Επίκουρος), הדיוטות
hedyoṭot ‘laymen’ (from Greek ἰδιώτης) (in Modern Hebrew loanwords may retain their foreign plural ending ד; Number: Modern Hebrew). However, these endings exhibit som…
Numerals: Modern Hebrew
(2,954 words)
The system of numerals in Modern Hebrew involves a marked schism between normative statements and actual colloquial use. From a normative perspective, the current system is very similar to that of earlier periods of Hebrew. But in colloquial use, two major tendencies are observed: a tendency towards neutralization of gender distinctions in cardinal numerals, and a change in the way definite distinctions are expressed in noun phrases containing cardinal numerals. These changes have received much …