The Arabicization of the Hebrew morphology in al-Andalus: the adaptation of the fa'ala paradigm (original) (raw)
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Journal of Semitic Studies, 2020
Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, tenth century) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew-called the Maḥberet-on Spanish soil. His role in the development of Hebrew grammar, however, has not been given pride of place in the scholarly literature. Renewed interest in his theory arose only in the late twentieth century. As some scholars have noted, Menaḥem was the first to reveal the three-consonantal basis of Hebrew roots. This article will continue to establish the basis for this concept, while further elaborating on several emphases in his teaching, especially in the context of the distinction between the radical and the servile letters and their subdivision, which, in our view, led Menaḥem to formulate his root concept. Following our analysis, we note a difference between the 'lexical root' concept, by which he arranged the entries in his Maḥberet, and the 'substantive root' concept on which he based his innovation. A parallel idea can be seen in the theory of Yūsuf Ibn Nūḥ, who set forth the jawhar concept, which means the basic entity of a word on the abstract level (as opposed to a word-based morphology), as Geoffrey Khan has shown. The article concludes with a clarification of the difference between Menaḥem's theory and that of Judah Ḥayyūj. Despite the enormous development made by Menaḥem, he was not able to offer a coherent morphological system, as Ḥayyūj did. Preface Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, 920-70) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew-called the Maḥberet-on Spanish soil. The noted scholar Wilhelm Bacher maintained that he had gone to great lengths to create Hebrew terminology, and that he was the first scholar who attempted to arrange the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible based on its roots, in a coherent and accurate
At certain stages in the history of the text of the sacred scriptures of both Judaism and Islam an effort was made to standardise their oral and written form. The standardisation of the written form of the text aimed to fix not only the content and its grammatical details but also the orthography in which the words were represented. When a manuscript of the Hebrew Bible or of the Arabic Qur'an was produced the scribe was generally not free to follow the orthographic system which was customary in the period in which he lived but was required to reproduce the orthography which had been fixed at an earlier period, despite the fact that the orthography in use in other types of manuscript had changed.