Hebrew Language & Literature

A unique history of the Hebrew language from biblical times to the modern Jewish state This book explores the extraordinary hold that Hebrew has had on Jews and Christians, who have invested it with a symbolic power far beyond that of any other language in history.

This book features data suggesting that the roots of all human words are universal and that words have related synonyms and antonyms that must have been intelligently designed. It contains 22,000 English-Hebrew links that provide surprising evidence.

More than simply a method of communication shared by a common people, the Hebrew language was always an integral part of the Jewish cultural system and, as such, tightly interwoven into the lives of the prophets, poets, scribes, and priests who used it. In this unique social history, William Schniedewind examines classical Hebrew from its origins in the second millennium BCE until the Rabbinic period, when the principles of Judaism as we know it today were formulated, to view the story of the Israelites through the lens of their language.

This book argues that the usage of language in Jewish societies can be understood as following from certain specific principles, particularly regarding the relationship between language and identity. Phenomena discussed include the revival of Hebrew, Hebrew in the Diaspora, the survival and 'sanctification' of Yiddish, the idea of 'Jewish languages', and the role of sociolinguistic phenomena in the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This volume is part of this new, emerging field of research. In addition to reviewing psychological research on reading (the author's specialty), the reader is introduced to the Hebrew language: its structure, its history, its writing system, and the issues involved in being fluently literate in Hebrew.

These 4 volumes contain articles on central linguistic themes, their related concepts and relationships with other disciplines. They intend to be authoritative, comprehensive and international in scope, while appealing to an academic audience. There is an alphabetic list of the articles; the longer entries are signed and followed by bibliographies.

The goal of this source is to present articles on the full range of linguistic disciplines (applied, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, etc.) and their inter-relationships, as well as their intersections with other disciplines.