Essays on Hebrew.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.

This work is a revision of some of Werner Weinberg's published articles on Hebrew. These studies first appeared in such journals as Hebrew Studies, Hebrew Union College Annual, and the Journal of Reform Judaism.

Part one, "Historical Perspectives," consists of three articles. "A Concise History of the Hebrew Language" (pp. 3-50) cannot compete with Chaim Rabin's masterful overview of the same subject ("Hebrew," Current Trends in Linguistics 6 [1970]: 304-46). Weinberg begins with a superficial account of Afroasiatic and Semitic, which contains some errors. For example, he states (p. 5, n. 6) that the term "Afroasiatic" goes back to Joseph H. Greenberg in 1952. Greenberg already used this alternate for Hamito-Semitic in 1950; however, the term was originally coined by M. Delafosse in 1914. See Alan S. Kaye and Peter T. Daniels, "The Comparative Afroasiatic Linguistics of the 1990's," Word 43 (1992): 431.

Unsophisticated statements are to be found, such as the following three examples.

"The assumed prototype language [Proto-Semitic] is no longer recognizable; it lies so far in the past that one must not expect to discover written documents displaying its features" (p. 3). Proto-Semitic (*)kalb- 'dog', however, looks like Arabic kalb, Aramaic kalba, Akkadian kalbu, Tigre kalb, Phoenician, Ugaritic, and Epigraphic South Arabian klb, and Hebrew [Hebrew Text Omitted]. Furthermore, no linguists expect(ed) to discover documents written in Proto-Semitic. A proto-language is, by definition, a hypothetical reconstruction.

"Arabic had its beginning as a written language around the middle of the first millennium B.C.E." (p. 8); yet the first inscription from Namarah is dated precisely to A.D. 328.

"Arabic is spoken on Malta and in Uzbekistan" (p. 8). It is as incorrect to say that the Maltese speak Arabic as it is to say that the Italians speak Latin. Rather, Maltese is to be considered a Semitic language in its own right, not (synchronically) an Arabic dialect. Uzbeki Arabic is probably extinct today, like Andalusi Arabic.

Some of Weinberg's terminology is eccentric. Mention is made of "classical Ethiopian" (for Classical Ethiopic or Ge ez) and "its Abyssinian languages" (for Ethiopian), "Berberic languages" (for Berber), the "Chad" group (for Chadic), and "Cushite" languages (for Cushitic) (all on p. 5). Neo-Aramaic dialects (p. 8) are not dialects at all, but rather separate languages. Shwa is called a "minimal central vowel" (p. 17). A mid-central...