The story of the modern Hebrew, a language brought to life by Eliezer ben Yehuda after being proclaimed for a long time dead, is fascinating and I am still looking for that coherent reference covering both the linguistic and the historical-political aspects of the revival. I had some big expactations that How the Hebrew Language Grew by Edward Horowitz will fill that knowledge gap.
My expectations weren't meet and I was largely disappointed. However, I gained a lot of knowledge about how family of words were created based on the 3-consonant root and from the linguistic point of view this is a very impressive gain. The book presents in a systematic was the rational explanations for Hebrew linguistic phenomena, base on word building. It is such a fascinating exercise to find out the common connections between relatively unrelated words and to learn to really 'feel' the language.
There are so many stories, probabably told somewhere in the big library, about those words and their formation, as languages and words in general are more than instruments of communication. They reflect real people and their life and grammar patterns often send back to ways of thinking. Especially in the case of languages with such a complex history, as in the case of Hebrew. Interesting too is how new words entered the language, some of them just took from other languages - French and English, among others - some adapted for the needs of the modern communication.
The book is very systematic, with a couple of questions and exercices at the end of each chapter, therefore it makes it a good tool for students of Hebrew and middle-level linguists.
The chapter covering words from other languages - Persian, Arabic - brought to Hebrew is a bit superficial in my opinion and I might have some doubts about some Arabic imports but otherwise it is an interesting read which brings a lot of good information for the curious reader.
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