Grammatical Concepts 101 for Biblical Hebrew.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Book Review

Grammatical Concepts 101 for Biblical Hebrew. By GARY A. LONG. Peabody, Mass.: HENDRICKSON PUBLISHERS, 2002. Pp. xvii + 189. $19.95 (paper).

The book under review is designed to teach the rudiments of Biblical Hebrew (BH) via contrastive analysis with English. This strategy is a good one because many of today's students have little or no background in the study of English grammar. The author explains and illustrates the basic grammatical concepts of English and then proceeds to elucidate similar features in BH. The concepts treated include: voice, tense, aspect, mood, participles, various parts of speech, and syntactic concerns as well. There is also a chapter on semantics, based on M. A. K. Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd ed. (London: Arnold, 1994).

The author has designed this volume as a supplement to the more detailed BH grammars available (and there are plenty of these written on various levels of linguistic sophistication and clarity). However, one can observe a prescriptive bias evident in many parts of the work: e.g., in commenting on 'whom,' we read: "American English speakers commonly use who, rather than whom, the 'correct' form" (p. 42). In this connection, let me note that 'whom' is dead in informal (basilectal and mesolectal) varieties of English, and survives only in the acrolect (see Alan S. Kaye, "Is English Diglossic?" English Today 7.4 [1991]: 8-14). Also, we note that in speaking about his first BH teacher, Robert Alden, Long remarks: "He saw me, seemingly, as a student needing help in speaking English more correctly. English is my mother tongue, but around Prof. Alden, I soon discovered that I, seemingly, had slept through lessons on grammar during high school and college" (p. xiii). Linguistics has long insisted on the clear differences between descriptive and prescriptive (or proscriptive) technique.

The bulk of the following remarks concerns imperfections in the tome. The material on BH phonetics (pp. 7-16) needs revision. The author claims that the phonetic information is in accordance with Modern Israeli Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation, "the commonest pronunciation one hears throughout Israel" (p. 7). This is incorrect, and not only that, the author uses the designation "Modern Israeli Sephardi" (p. 7) for what is usually called Arabicized or "Oriental" Israeli Hebrew, whose characteristics include the voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives (the former of which is mentioned on p. 8)...