Hebrew grammar - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

History of studies in Hebrew grammar

Masoretes

The Masoretes were groups of mostly Karaite scribes and scholars working between the 7th and 11th centuries, based primarily in present-day Israel in the cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, as well as in Iraq...

in the 7th to 11th centuries laid the foundation for grammatical analysis of Hebrew. As early as the 9th century Judah ibn Kuraish

Judah ibn Kuraish

Judah ibn Kuraish , was a Hebrew grammarian and lexicographer. He was born at Tahort, in northern Africa in the 10th century. While his grammatical works advanced little beyond his predecessors, he was the first in studying comparative philology in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic...

discussed the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In the 10th century, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher

Aaron ben Moses ben Asher

Aaron ben Moses ben Asher was a Jewish scribe who refined the Tiberian system for writing down vowel sounds in Hebrew, which is still in use today, and serves as the basis for grammatical analysis...

refined the Tiberian vocalization

Tiberian vocalization

The Tiberian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; this system soon became used to vocalize other texts as well...

, an extinct pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible

Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

.

The first treatises on Hebrew grammar appear in the High Middle Ages

High Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages was the period of European history around the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries . The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, which by convention end around 1500....

, in the context of Midrash

Midrash

The Hebrew term Midrash is a homiletic method of biblical exegesis. The term also refers to the whole compilation of homiletic teachings on the Bible....

(a method of interpreting and studying the Hebrew Bible). The Karaite tradition originated in Abbasid

Abbasid

The Abbasid Caliphate or, more simply, the Abbasids , was the third of the Islamic caliphates. It was ruled by the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs, who built their capital in Baghdad after overthrowing the Umayyad caliphate from all but the al-Andalus region....

Baghdad

Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...

around the 7th century. The Diqduq (10th century) is one of the earliest grammatical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.

Solomon ibn Gabirol

Solomon ibn Gabirol

Solomon ibn Gabirol, also Solomon ben Judah , was an Andalucian Hebrew poet and Jewish philosopher with a Neoplatonic bent. He was born in Málaga about 1021; died about 1058 in Valencia.-Biography:...

in the 11th century composed a versified Hebrew grammar, consisting of 400 verses divided into ten parts. In the 12th century, Ibn Barun compared the Hebrew language

Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...

with Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

in the Islamic grammatical tradition.
11th to 12th century grammarians of the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain included Judah ben David Hayyuj

Judah ben David Hayyuj

Judah ben David Hayyuj was a Jewish linguist. He is regarded as the father of scientific grammar of Hebrew language. He was born in Fez, Morocco, about 945...

, Jonah ibn Janah, Abraham ibn Ezra

Abraham ibn Ezra

Rabbi Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra was born at Tudela, Navarre in 1089, and died c. 1167, apparently in Calahorra....

, Joseph Kimhi

Joseph Kimhi

Joseph Ḳimḥi , was a medieval Jewish rabbi and biblical commentator. He was the father of Moses and David Kimhi, and the teacher of Rabbi Menachem Ben Simeon....

, Moses Kimhi

Moses Kimhi

Moses Kimhi was a medieval Jewish biblical commentator and grammarian.-Birth and Early Life:Kimhi was born around 1127, the eldest son of Joseph Kimhi and the brother of David Kimhi, known as the RaDaK. He was born and lived in the Provence region of southern France, and area that was heavily...

and David Kimhi

David Kimhi

David Kimhi , also known by the Hebrew acronym as the RaDaK , was a medieval rabbi, biblical commentator, philosopher, and grammarian. Born in Narbonne, Provence, he was the son of Rabbi Joseph Kimhi and the brother of Rabbi Moses Kimhi, both biblical commentators and grammarians...

. Ibn Ezra gives a list of the oldest Hebrew grammarians in the introduction to his Moznayim (1140).
Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...

was "a tolerable Hebrew scholar". Profiat Duran

Profiat Duran

Profiat Duran , also known as Efodi ; also known as Isaac ben Moses ha-Levi; was a physician, philosopher, grammarian, and controversialist in the 14th century. It is not known whether he was born at Perpignan, where he lived for some years, or in another Catalonian town...

published an influential grammar in 1403.

Judah Messer Leon

Judah Messer Leon (15th century)

Judah ben Jehiel Rofe, , more usually called Judah Messer Leon, was an Italian rabbi, teacher, physician, and philosopher...

's 1454 grammar is a product of the Italian Renaissance

Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...

. Hebrew grammars by Christian authors

Christian Hebraist

A Christian Hebraist is a scholar of Hebrew who comes from a Christian family background/belief, or is a Jewish adherent of Christianity. The main area of study is that commonly known as the Old Testament to Christians , but Christians have occasionally taken an interest in the Talmud, and...

appeared during the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

. Hieronymus Buclidius, a friend of Erasmus, gave more than 20,000 francs to establish a branch of Hebrew studies at Louvain

Leuven

Leuven is the capital of the province of Flemish Brabant in the Flemish Region, Belgium...

in Flanders

Flanders

Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...

. Elijah Levita was called to the chair of Hebrew at the University of Paris

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

. Cardinal Grimani and other dignitaries, both of the state and of the Church, studied Hebrew and the Cabala

Kabbalah

Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...

with Jewish teachers; even the warrior Guido Rangoni attempted the Hebrew language with the aid of Jacob Mantino (1526). Pico de la Mirandola (d. 1494) was the first to collect Hebrew manuscripts, and Reuchlin was the first to write a modern grammar of the Hebrew language (1506).
Conrad Gesner (d. 1565) was the first Christian to compile a catalogue of Hebrew books.
Paul Fagius

Paul Fagius

Paul Fagius was a Renaissance scholar of Biblical Hebrew.-Life:Fagius was born at Rheinzabern in 1504. His father was a teacher and council clerk. In 1515 he went to study at the University of Heidelberg and in 1518 was present at the Heidelberg Disputation...

and Elia Levita

Elia Levita

Elia Levita , also known as Elijah Levita, Elias Levita, Élie Lévita, Eliahu Bakhur was a Renaissance Hebrew grammarian, scholar and poet. He was influential in helping to create the Yiddish language...

operated the first Hebrew printing office in the 1540s. Levita also compiled the first Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary.

Through the influence of Johannes Buxtorf

Johannes Buxtorf

Johannes Buxtorf was a celebrated Hebraist, member of a family of Orientalists; professor of Hebrew for thirty-nine years at Basel and was known by the title, "Master of the Rabbis". His massive tome, De Synagoga Judaica Johannes Buxtorf (December 25, 1564 – September 13, 1629) was a...

(d. 1629) a serious attempt was made to understand the post-Biblical literature, and many of the most important works were translated into Latin. Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar appeared in 1813.

Eras

The Hebrew language is subdivided by era, with significant differences apparent between the varieties. All varieties, from Biblical to Modern, use a typically Semitic templatic morphology with triconsonantal stems, though Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew have significant borrowed components of the lexicon that do not fit into this pattern. Verbal morphology has remained relatively unchanged, though Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew have lost some modal distinctions of Biblical Hebrew and created others through the use of auxiliary verbs.

Significant syntactic changes have arisen in Modern Hebrew as a result of non-Semitic substrate influences. In particular:

In Biblical Hebrew, possession is normally expressed with status constructus
Status constructus
The construct state or status constructus is a noun form occurring in Afro-Asiatic languages. It is particularly common in Semitic languages , Berber languages, and in the extinct Egyptian language...

, a construction in which the possessed noun occurs in a phonologically reduced, "construct" form and is followed by the possessor noun in its normal, "absolute" form. Modern Hebrew tends to reserve this construction for phrases where the two components form a unified concept, whereas ordinary possession is more commonly expressed analytically with the preposition shel 'of' (etymologically consisting of the relativizer she- 'that' and the preposition le- 'to').
Possession in pronouns is expressed with pronominal suffixes added to the noun. Modern Hebrew tends to reserve this for a limited number of nouns, but usually prefers to use the preposition shel, as in the previous case.
Biblical Hebrew often expresses a pronoun direct object by appending a pronominal suffix directly to the verb, as an alternative to appending it to the preposition that signals a definite direct object. The latter construction is the one generally used in Modern Hebrew.
The tense–aspect
Tense-aspect-mood
Tense–aspect–mood, commonly abbreviated ' and also called tense–modality–aspect or ', is the grammatical system in a language that covers the expression of tense , aspect , and mood or modality...

that is formed by prefixes could denote either the present (especially frequentative
Frequentative
In grammar, a frequentative form of a word is one which indicates repeated action. The frequentative form can be considered a separate, but not completely independent word, called a frequentative...

) or the future, as well as frequentative past in Biblical Hebrew (some scholars argue that it simply denoted imperfective aspect
Imperfective aspect
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, and similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future...

), while in modern Hebrew it is always future. The suffixed form denotes what is commonly translated as past in both cases, though some scholars argue that it denoted perfective aspect
Perfective aspect
The perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...

.
Biblical Hebrew employs the so-called waw consecutive construction, in which the conjunction "and" seemingly reverses the tense of a verb (though its exact meaning is a matter of debate). This is not typical of Modern Hebrew.
The default word order in Biblical Hebrew is VSO, while Modern Hebrew is SVO.

However, most Biblical Hebrew constructions are still permissible in Modern Hebrew in formal, literary, archaic or poetic style.

External links

Hebrew Verbs Conjugation Tool - Online Hebrew Verb Learning Tool (Hebrew/English)
Glamour of the Grammar - Hebraist Dr. Joel M. Hoffman's biweekly column on Hebrew grammar
Foundationstone — Online Hebrew Tutorial
Hebrew is easy, by Babel
Learning Hebrew, Young Israel (most of the links leading to language learning are now dead links)
A Basic Introduction to Hebrew grammar
History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language, David Steinberg

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History of studies in Hebrew grammar

Eras

See also

External links