One of the curiosities in “The Story of Hebrew” by Lewis Glinert (Princeton University Press) is that the author manages to write a history of the Hebrew language without using a single Hebrew letter ...

Linguists tend to imagine language as a phenomenon outside human agency, its processes, like language change and acquisition, explained by deterministic rules. Dartmouth linguist Lewis Glinert, author ...

For nearly 2,000 years, Hebrew was a dead language. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, this liturgical language made a comeback as a modern tongue. Its revival is unprecedented, said Nancy Berg, a ...

All cultures have a tendency to make their building blocks into part of a collective myth, oversimplifying them in textbooks and in the collective consciousness of their members. We Jews are hardly ...