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This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

This book provides a new explanation for what has long been a challenge for scholars of Biblical Hebrew: how to understand the expression of verbal tense and aspect.Working from a representative text corpus, combined with database queries of specific usages and surveys of examples discussed in the scholarly literature, Ulf Bergström gives a.

When non-Orthodox Jews becomefrum(religious), they encounter much more than dietary laws and Sabbath prohibitions. They find themselves in the midst of a whole new culture, involving matchmakers, homemade gefilte fish, and Yiddish-influenced grammar.Becoming Frumexplains how these newcomers learn Orthodox language and culture through their interactions with community veterans and other newcomers. Some take on as much as they can as quickly as they can, going beyond the norms of those raised in the community. Others maintain aspects of their pre-Orthodox selves, yielding unique combinations, like Matisyahu's reggae music or Hebrew words and sing-song intonation used with American slang, as in \"mamish(really) keepin' it real.\"Sarah Bunin Benor brings insight into the phenomenon of adopting a new identity based on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research among men and women in an American Orthodox community. Her analysis is applicable to other situations of adult language socialization, such as students learning medical jargon or Canadians moving to Australia.Becoming Frumoffers a scholarly and accessible look at the linguistic and cultural process of \"becoming.\"

Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a \"Jewish renaissance.\" Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.

This volume investigates practices by which the Qumran community constituted itself as a sectarian society by reconstructing the identity of its members. Drawing on discourse and practice theory, the book analyzes the function of the Serek ha-Yahad and the Hodoyot in identity formation.

The present volume offers a fresh look at the crucial role which Christan Hebraism played in the development of the humanities and modern philology. Christian theology, Jewish tradition and linguistic interest had an irreversible impact on the understanding of holy texts and language.

This essay explores the phenomenon of the translation of scientific works from European languages into Yiddish from the early sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century. By following the trajectory of texts and ideas from the non-Jewish realm to the Ashkenazi Jewish vernacular, it draws attention to the ways in which cultural and scientific innovations reached Jewish readers of various classes, spaces, and genders well beyond the narrow elite of rabbinically or university-trained Jews. The essay challenges the notion that there existed in early modern Europe a neat division of labor between Hebrew, the language of the learned elite, and Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses. It also contributes to recent scholarship calling into question the prominence of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) as a harbinger of Ashkenazi interest in non-Jewish knowledge in general, and science in particular. Mapping the hitherto overlooked interactions between Yiddish readers and writers and early modern scientific thought, this essay opens avenues into new research on the complex relationships between the interrelated corpora of early modern Jews and Christians, physicians and rabbis, scholars and laypeople.

The article examines the origins of the phrase “oom-shmoom” that has become emblematic of Israel's negative attitudes to the United Nations. The discussion is situated in the context of the competing foreign-policy schools of thought associated with David Ben-Gurion (activist, militant) and Moshe Sharett (diplomatic, moderate). It looks at examples from the 1950s illustrating the rhetorical uses that politicians made of the slogan in order to denigrate rivals for their presumed lack of toughness and inadequate concern for Israel's security needs. While much about Israel's foreign policy during its early years can be explained in terms the Ben-Gurion/Sharett dichotomy, the differences between the Ben-Gurionists and the Sharettists regarding “oom-shmoom” were more often in the realm of rhetoric than in action and policy. In their day-to-day political decisions, both Ben-Gurion and Sharett showed a healthy respect for the UN and for the great powers which stood ready to back UN decisions.

F. M van Helmont's Alphabet of Nature was one of many books published about language in the early modern period. The \"language debate,\" as it has come to be called, was a topic of compelling interest to major figures such as Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. At issue were profound questions about whether language is natural or artificial, ordained by God or created by man. The answers given entailed a web of consequences that could lead to arrest, imprisonment, even execution. It is therefore not surprising that van Helmont wrote his book while imprisoned in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.

Over the last two decades, the study of languages and writing systems and their relationship to literacy acquisition has begun to spread beyond studies based mostly on English language learners. As the worldwide demand for literacy continues to grow, researchers from different countries with different language backgrounds have begun examining the connection between their language and writing system and literacy acquisition. This volume is part of this new, emerging field of research. In addition to reviewing psychological research on reading (the author's specialty), the reader is introduced to the Hebrew language: its structure, its history, its writing system, and the issues involved in being fluently literate in Hebrew. Chapters 1-4 introduce the reader to the Hebrew language and word structure and focuses on aspects of Hebrew that have been specifically researched by experimental cognitive psychologists. The reader whose only interest is in the psychological mechanisms of reading Hebrew may be satisfied with these chapters. Chapters 5-8 briefly surveys the history of the Hebrew language and its writing system, the origin of literacy in Hebrew as one of the first alphabetic systems, and then raises questions about the viability (or possibility) of having full-scale literacy in Hebrew. Together, the two sets of chapters present the necessary background for studying the psychology of reading Hebrew and literacy in Hebrew. This volume is appropriate for anyone interested in comparative reading and writing systems or in the Hebrew language in particular. This includes linguists, researchers, and graduate students in such diverse fields as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, literacy education, English as a second language, and communication disorders. Contents: Preface. Introduction. The Hebrew Word. Decoding Hebrew Words. Morphological Aspects of Reading Hebrew Words. The Development of the Hebrew Language. The Evolution of the Hebrew Writing System. The Viability of Literacy in Hebrew. Perceptions and Evidence of Early Literacy in Hebrew.