My Lexicographic Work on Dictionaries of Modern and Biblical Hebrew: Experiences, Difficulties, Uncertainties, Final Decisions Regarding Selected Lexical Entries, and Initial Ideas Regarding Changes that took place in the Transition from Biblical Hebrew to Later Phases of the language

Professor Shmuel Bolozky's presentation draws on his extensive experience in Hebrew lexicography, morphology, language development, and language teaching to examine the practical and theoretical problems involved in compiling dictionaries of both Modern and Biblical Hebrew.

The presentation focuses particularly on the unusual historical development of Hebrew, the selection of lexical entries for Modern Hebrew dictionaries, lexical frequency and registers of usage, and the semantic and structural changes that took place between Biblical Hebrew and later phases of the language. It also considers how understanding these developments can assist non-native learners of Hebrew.

Compiling dictionaries is not a simple project, especially in a language such as Hebrew, mostly because of the 1,700 years or so when it did not develop naturally as a spoken living language, but existed only as a liturgical and scholarly/literary medium. When it was revived as a living language starting at the beginning of the 20th century, the "revivers" understandably decided that all former phases of the language, even when not spoken, would constitute the basis for the planned revival. Consequently, with the fairly rapid growth of the native speaking population since then, the number of lexical items from the inherited traditions that would answer their needs determined that a large proportion of lexemes will not be useful, and innovators (authors, linguists, the Hebrew Language Committee and later the Hebrew Language Academy) rushed to fill in the gaps with lexical innovations. Thus, for practical purposes, reliable dictionaries of Modern Hebrew need to depend on frequency counts, which also usually reflect actual usage, easily available for Biblical Hebrew and only partially for Modern Hebrew, optimally supplemented by level of usage registers (high-literary, mid-level, colloquial), again not easily determined. Thus, selection of lexical entries is therefore not easy. Furthermore, changes that took place in the transition from Biblical Hebrew to later phases of the language need to be taken into account in order to determine whether such semantic developments make sense so that they can be used pedagogically to facilitate their processing by the non-native language learner.

Prof. Dr. Shmuel Bolozky is Professor Emeritus in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A linguist by training, he specialises in Hebrew phonology and morphology, with particular emphasis on the sound system of Modern Hebrew, word formation, morphological productivity, and the relationship between linguistic structure and language instruction.

His research examines natural, phonetically motivated linguistic processes and the organisation, development, and productivity of Hebrew word-formation patterns. An important dimension of his scholarship is the application of linguistic analysis to the teaching and learning of Hebrew.

Prof. Bolozky is the author of major works on Israeli Hebrew morphology, Hebrew verbs, and Hebrew lexicography, and co-author of a comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Hebrew. His research has appeared in leading journals devoted to Hebrew linguistics, general linguistics, language sciences, language teaching, and Jewish studies.

Prof. Bolozky is currently preparing a major dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. The project builds on a lexical database based on Even-Shoshan's Hebrew dictionary and involves the identification, separation, and analysis of Biblical Hebrew lexical entries while taking into account differences between earlier and later editions of the source dictionary.

The project brings his long-standing work in Modern Hebrew lexicography into direct dialogue with Biblical Hebrew and forms an important background to his conference presentation.

Related lexicographic research at the Institute includes Željko Stanojević's Serbian–Hebrew / Hebrew–Serbian Dictionary, which brings Biblical and Modern Hebrew into a broader bilingual lexicographic framework.