L'Aprenentatge de l'hebreu vers la fi del segle II dC

Nobody would dream of disputing that the ancient Rabbis spoke Hebrew, nor that they did so very well. They had a comprehensive knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and were perfectly capable of quoting it word for word at will. They used Hebrew to write extensive biblical essays, which, while seemingly extravagant by modern philological standards, show tremendous linguistic sensitivity. It was they who passed on many of the traditions of Halakhah in Hebrew, a tongue that they also used for prayer. Hebrew was so essential to their religious identity, and they were so comfortable with its use, that it is easy to forget that it was not their mother tongue but a second language that they acquired through a great deal of hard work, a sacred language that was not part of everyday life. So, how did they learn Hebrew? Given that Aramaic was their mother tongue, it is highly unlikely that the Rabbis were educated in Hebrew in the period in question. Simply stating that they learned a great many Hebrew texts by heart and thus somehow came to absorb the language is not a completely satisfactory explanation either. Likewise, suggestions that they achieved such a high level of active knowledge of Hebrew as a second language by using it in day-to-day life can be ruled out, as they probably did not use it amongst themselves for everyday matters. Even if they had done so, the Hebrew in which they wrote their literary works is clearly not a colloquial, everyday form of the language. The Rabbis proved to be actively proficient in the highest literary registers of Hebrew. They could not have achieved that proficiency via osmosis as a result of the repetition of texts, nor through the use of the colloquial variant of the language spoken in marketplaces. Some kind of constant, systematic language study was necessary. As so many of them attained such proficiency, the path that they followed to that end must have been well trodden. Is it possible to trace their steps along that path? Despite their vast knowledge of Hebrew, there is no clear evidence of the Rabbis ever having studied the language’s grammar in any depth. We do not even know if there were resources that would have enabled them to learn Hebrew, such as the grammar guides, dictionaries and other similar works we take for granted when studying a foreign language today. Hebrew was learned through the Jewish education system, the raison d’être of which was to teach the language. Everything suggests that there were a great many schools in Palestine’s Jewish towns in the latter days of the Second Temple period and the subsequent Talmudic era. The Bet Sefer syllabus was exclusively geared to teaching children to read the Hebrew Bible. Schools were thus entirely religious and did not teach practical skills that could be used for trade purposes. Those looking to learn a trade or a craft were generally taught it by their father, another relative or a friend of the family. When they began studying, pupils were encouraged to copy Hebrew letters onto tablets to aid the development of their reading skills, although there is nothing to suggest that calligraphy was part of the curriculum in its own right. The art of the scribe was a trade, which, like any other, was learned outside the primary school system. In Jewish society in rabbinic times, literacy basically involved knowing how to read, not knowing how to write. How did teachers go about their work? The first stage must have consisted of memorising fragments of the Scripture. The second stage, part of which may have taken place at the same time as the first, consisted of memorising the translation of the Hebrew Bible into the tongue spoken by the pupils (Aramaic, in the case of Palestinian schools). The translation in question was crucial in terms of learning Hebrew. It had to be performed very carefully, so as to correlate each word with its original counterpart to the greatest extent possible. Rabbinic sources appear to reflect differences of opinion with regard to how the biblical text ought to be read. There was a school of thought that a verse should not be split up but read in full, as a whole. That meant that the Aramaic translation of each verse also had to be recited as a whole. The Targum was certainly read in that manner in synagogues, with each full verse of the Bible corresponding to a full verse in Aramaic. Some people advocated following that practice at Bet Sefer establishments too. It is important to know how the Rabbis studied Hebrew. The best answer to the question posed above seems to be that they learned Hebrew in much the same way as their non-Jewish contemporaries learned other foreign literary languages, namely through memorisation and literal translation. In this respect, as in so many others, the Rabbis’ practice dovetailed perfectly with those of Late Antiquity

Language reform as language ideology: an examination of Israeli feminist language practice

textThis dissertation, an ethnographic and sociolinguistic case study of Israeli feminist practices, investigates the relationship between language use, language ideology, and the socio-cultural construction of gender and gender identity. Taking the definition of language use presented by McConnell-Ginet (1988) as a guide, I analyze both the linguistic behavior and the metalinguistic discourse of fifteen self-identified Israeli feminists, to determine how ideologies related to language, gender, and philosophies of social change interact with the structural and sociolinguistic facts of Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH) to shape these women’s intentional and habitual practices of language use. I used the theoretical concepts of “indexicality” (Ochs 1992) and “community of practice” (Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999) to examine how the participants in my study used the linguistic resources in their socio-culture repertoire to negotiate a coherent social identity in both feminist and mainstream Jewish Israeli contexts. To date, most of the literature on feminist language practice has examined these issues in English or other Indo-European language speaking contexts. This dissertation contributes to the discussion on the relationship between language and gender by examining these issues in a Hebrew-speaking context. Hebrew, a root-and-pattern language, has a binary system of gender based noun classification in which agreement is marked on predicates as well as pronouns and adjectives. Thus, avoiding gender pre-specification of animate referents in language use, particularly spoken language, is extremely difficult. Furthermore, the association of cultural gender characteristics with the grammatical categories of MASCULINE and FEMININE, through the processes of iconization and erasure (Gal and Irvine 2000), has more implications for meanings of gendered forms. Feminist Hebrew is distinguished from the contemporary and the prescribed standard uses of Modern Israeli Hebrew in three specific ways: (1) the use of hyper-standardized FEMININE forms for referential and indexical marking of feminine gender in sex-specific contexts, (2) the use of FEMININE forms for ambiguous generic or definite inclusive reference, and (3) the overt double gendering of nominal or predicate forms (the Hebrew equivalent of he/she) in speaking or writing. The dissertation includes a detailed quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic analysis of my informants’ practices to explain how they used variables from feminist and conventional varieties of MIH to express both referential and social-indexical meaning. I discuss the possible social meanings of inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation. I explore what these meanings can (or cannot) tell us about each woman’s status in the community as well as the overall relationship between language use and the constitutive nature of the Israeli feminist community. Finally, I examine the sociolinguistic strategies employed by two women, an Israeli feminist politician and a Jewish feminist activist married to an Arab man, to explore how they use the full range of their linguistic repertoires to negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural contexts.Linguistic

Review of \u3ci\u3eLanguage and the State: Revitalization and Revival in Israel and Eire\u3c/i\u3e, edited by Sue Wright; \u3ci\u3eThe Language Question in the Census of Population\u3c/i\u3e, by Mícheál Ó Gliasáin

Language and the state contains two formal papers, plus the questions and answers that followed each. The occasion was a Current Issues in Language and Society seminar held at the University of Birmingham in September 1995; the speakers were Bernard Spolsky of the Language Policy Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Israel (“Conditions for language revitalization: A comparison of the cases of Hebrew and Maori”), and Muiris Ó Laoire of the Irish Language Department, University College Galway, Ireland (“An historical perspective on the revival of Irish outside the Gaeltacht, 1880–1930, with reference to the revitalization of Hebrew”). Perhaps because Israel and Ireland constitute a rare pair of cases in which the energies and resources of the state have been devoted to the promotion of a language spoken by relatively few at the time of the state\u27s official formation, the volume\u27s title is framed in terms of those two cases alone. But this seriously downplays the value of Spolsky\u27s discussion of Maori revitalization efforts, which greatly enhances the book\u27s contribution, and in fact makes this a book that no one deeply concerned with small-language revitalization efforts should miss

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)

Bible Software

This article is a statement of unbridled praise for the present state of software available for Bible studies, particularly in the use of the Biblical text in its original languages and alphabets. After giving examples of various products related to Bible study, the article turns to descriptions and comparisons of three programs, Gramcord, Logos, and BibleWorks

Heritage language maintenance in New Zealand : the case of Hebrew.

This thesis explores how Israeli immigrants in New Zealand approach the maintenance of Hebrew, their heritage language. These families are in the unique position of having to navigate religious as well as cultural, familial and ideological factors as they undertake the challenge of language planning. The dimension of religion – in this case, Judaism - is an aspect which few studies have investigated when exploring migrant communities. In particular, New Zealand’s Israeli community remains under-researched. This thesis is the first study to look into the language maintenance efforts of this particular community and specifically investigate the connection between religion and the driving forces of language transmission. Three main questions are asked: 1) How do Israeli immigrants in New Zealand maintain Hebrew as their heritage language? 2) How do Israeli immigrant parents view the connection between Hebrew language and Judaism, and how does this impact their motivations to maintain Hebrew with their children? And 3) How effective are the language maintenance efforts of Israeli immigrants in New Zealand? By answering these questions and contextualising them within the framework of Family Language Policy, this thesis will extend the limited, existing knowledge of the interaction between linguistic choices and religion to include the Jewish perspective. It will also expand understandings of heritage language vitality in New Zealand to include the prospects of Hebrew. Twenty-eight individuals completed a digitised survey designed by the researcher and powered by Qualtrics and six semi-structured interviews were conducted to gain a deeper insight into the themes found quantitatively. The results showed that Israeli parents see bilingualism as an achievable outcome for their children and that this ideology resulted in predominantly Hebrew-only language practices in the home. Survey and interview participants also perceived a strong link between Hebrew and Judaism, however, interview participants did not cite religious continuity as their main reason for maintaining Hebrew. Additionally, Israeli parents cited various other factors motivating them to maintain Hebrew with their children such as the cognitive, academic and socioeconomic benefits they associate with bilingualism. Despite highly positive attitudes to language maintenance, the results showed that children were, in all areas aside from one, more proficient in English than they were in Hebrew and that their Hebrew literacy skills were underdeveloped. This potentially indicates that parents’ current efforts are not sufficient for long-term heritage language maintenance. It is posited that sibling dynamics and intermarriage play a strong role in Hebrew transmission, however, the relationship between such factors and heritage language maintenance requires further investigation. It is suggested that support from Jewish and Israeli organisations in the form of literacy resources and the welcoming of mixed families may help this population avoid language shift. The results of this thesis provide support for Bernard Spolsky’s (2021) latest claims and contrast with Tannenbaum’s (2012) coping mechanism framework

Mapping Professional Development for Jewish Educators

Describes the desirable and necessary characteristics of effective professional development in Jewish education, the various opportunities and approaches available to Jewish educators, and possibilities for future expansion and improvement