History of Hebrew grammar

Hebrew grammar is the grammar of the Hebrew language

History of studies in Hebrew grammar

The Masoretes in the 7th to 11th centuries laid the foundation for grammatical analysis of Hebrew. As early as the 9th century Judah ibn Kuraish discussed the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In the 10th century, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher refined the Tiberian vocalization, an extinct pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible.

The first treatises on Hebrew grammar appear in the

Diqduq (10th century) is one of the earliest grammatical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.^[1]

Islamic grammatical tradition.^[2]

11th to 12th century grammarians of the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain included Judah ben David Hayyuj, Jonah ibn Janah, Abraham ibn Ezra, Joseph Kimhi, Moses Kimhi and David Kimhi. Ibn Ezra gives a list of the oldest Hebrew grammarians in the introduction to his Moznayim (1140). Profiat Duran published an influential grammar in 1403.

Reuchlin was the first Christian author to write a vocabulary and short grammar of the Hebrew language (1506).^[3] A more detailed grammar was published in 1590 by Otto Walper.^[4]

Conrad Gesner

(d. 1565) was the first Christian to compile a catalogue of Hebrew books. Paul Fagius and Elia Levita operated the first Hebrew printing office in the 1540s. Levita also compiled the first Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary.

Through the influence of Johannes Buxtorf (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, 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').^[5]^[6]

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.[7]
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.^[7]
The
tense–aspect that is formed by prefixes could denote either the present (especially frequentative) or the future, as well as frequentative past in Biblical Hebrew (some scholars argue that it simply denoted imperfective aspect), 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.^[8]

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.^[9]