A History of the Hebrew Language

Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction
Review: This is an excellent introduction into the internal linguistic history of the Hebrew language. The bibliography is 66 pages long, in rather small print, and is constantly referred to in the text. As a starting point to get an overview of this field of scholarship, it is probably without equal today.
As a technical work, presenting a summary of a highly technical field of study, it is astonishingly accessible to the non-specialist. Much more so than, for example, the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon, in that for citing examples only two alphabets are used: Hebrew, of course, and a Latin based phonetic alphabet defined in a table on page 19. It does not assume a knowledge of the scripts of Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian cuneiform and so on. Even mastery of the Hebrew alphabet is not strictly necessary to use the work because all citations in Hebrew are accompanied by transliterations into the phonetic alphabet.
The author employs the terminology and methods of descriptive linguistics, but those who have had an introductory course in this field will have little difficulty with it. It is assumed that the reader knows what is meant by terms like phoneme, allophone, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme, isogloss, synchronic, diachronic, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent work, but not for everyone
Review: This is an excellent work that reconstructs 3000 years of this ancient language. It is not however an easy read. the subject matter is rather arcane - the changes in pronunciation and usage throughout the history of the language. If you have a professional interest in dating hebrew texts using grammatical features, this book is indispensible. If your interest is more personal, you don't really need to be linguist to read this book, but two things are highly recommended--
1) At least one year of college-level biblical hebrew study.
2) A high interest in the mechanical and psychological details of language.
If you think this subject might interest you, but would like to start with something simpler but still top quality -- try William Chomsky's "Hebrew: The Eternal Language."

Rating:
Summary: Incomprehensible for the layman, and needlessly so.
Review: This is very probably a great book. Scholars and linguist majors may well find it a treasure. But it is nearly incomprehensible to the layman -- and needlessly so. The author uses a torrent of highly technical terms but never defines or explains them. There is no glossary. There are no parenthetical or footnoted explanations. What is worse is that the author makes almost no attempt to state clearly just what he is talking about. For example, he spends much time stating, and describing in mind-numbing analytical detail, the technical differences between Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew, and modern Israeli Hebrew. But he never once gives an example of how a typical sentence would read in Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew and Israeli Hebrew. The same is true of his comparisons between early Hebrew and cognate Semitic languages. The reader is left bereft of simple, helpful statements. The book is best left to the linguist. Laymen avoid!