Hebrew Alphabet Research Articles

Letters of the Hebrew Alphabet: As Sound Notation

Letters of the Hebrew Alphabet: As Sound Notation

When Yiddish Was Written in Latin Letters

Abstract Although Yiddish was traditionally written in Hebrew letters, texts in this language were also recorded using Latin characters in various circumstances, times, and places. These texts offer valuable information regarding pronunciation traditions and shed light on the processes of cultural history and sociolinguistics that acted as catalysts to their preparation. Various studies have discussed this phenomenon, yet they usually focus on one specific reason for using the Latin alphabet, such as ideological Romanization or linguistic adequacy. The following article offers for the first time a descriptive survey of the entire corpus, from the Early Modern Era to the present day. Paying close attention to the orthography used and the variety recorded, this article discerns within the studied corpus distinct categories reflecting the religious, linguistic, and ideological backgrounds of the texts’ authors and intended readers as well as technical factors pertaining to print. It also highlights the crucial role of the Hebrew alphabet in Yiddish culture.

The Education of Children and Youth in the Seventeenth Century Amsterdam’s Western Sephardi Community

This article is a study of how the Amsterdam Sephardi congregation organized its educational system starting in the early 1600s. On 25 May 1616, the two existing congregations at the time, Bet Jacob [House of Jacob] and Neve Salom [Dwellings of Peace], founded the “Hebra Kedosa Talmud Torah” [Holy Confraternity Talmud Torah], an institution that was to fund the education of male children and youth. On that day, the lay congregational leaders elected two interim officers to organize the festivities two days later on Shavuot, the Jewish festival traditionally associated with the initiation of children in the study of the Torah. The newly formed school educated male children as young as five years old and consisted of six grades, starting with the teaching of the Hebrew alphabet, and ending with the Talmud. In 1637, the congregation founded the “Ets Haim” [Tree of Life] confraternity to provide stipends to older, deserving, and talented students, so that they remained in school. A third stage took place in 1639 when the three congregations united into one under the name “Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah,” and the merged school consisted of seven grades. The author argues that this educational system was a blending of attributes from the Jewish medieval tradition and the Iberian Jesuit system which emphasized the character formation of its students that the lay founders of the Sephardi congregation had experienced while they were living as conversos in Spain or Portugal.

El Lissitzky’s Red Wedge as the Hebrew letter Yud


 
 
 The analysis undertaken in this paper sets out with El Lissitzky’s 1919 revolutionary poster entitled Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. This artwork, composed of simple geometric figures, in which an acute-angled red triangle splits the form of a white circle, was used by Soviet propaganda to affirm the so-called ‘October events’. However, a thorough analysis of the poster, i.e. its sources, inspirations, borrowings and contexts, supports the hypothesis that the principal motif (the wedge) also constitutes a graphic equivalent of a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the letter yud, represented as a small comma or, significantly, an acute-angled triangle. Such a premise yields further consequences with regard to meanings, encompassing aspects related to the Jewish iconic tradition that involve mysticism, magic, and the kabbalah.
 
 

Draw Me After by Peter Cole

Reviewed by: Draw Me After by Peter Cole Arthur Willemse PETER COLE Draw Me After New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 113 pages. "PERHAPS IT ALSO has to do with the alphabet—that there isn't really one, that there are lots of them: each produces its own kind of thinking. Like bricks, some, fired and smooth, yield cathedrals, while others, of rough clay, become the peasants' shacks." The musings of Father Chmielowski, from Olga Tokarczuk's great novel The Books of Jacob, with its special attention to Jewish history and religion, appear to apply to Peter Cole's latest book of poetry, Draw Me After. Draw Me After has three separate but overlapping concerns: first, like Tokarczuk's character, it attempts to understand the implications of the architecture of language and alphabet, of the letters of the Jewish language as they are drawn. Second, building from a preceding collaboration, On Being Drawn (2020), it wants to pay homage to the drawings of Terry Winters, whose art is included in the book, as it enters into a dialogue with the poetry. Third, it includes translations by Cole from Hebrew (and, in one instance, Persian) poetry—ancient and twentieth century. All three converge as a [End Page 87] kind of writing in the sand, where authorships disappear, intersect, and emerge. The basic structure of this collections is provided by Cole's glossing of the Hebrew alphabet: in twenty-two beautiful poems, these letters are brought out in their very shape and the cultural contemporary resonances that they involve, for instance in the short poem devoted to ('hey'): "Hey you, she whispered / into the morning / the he inside her bare in its longing, there / in the air of soft address, flickering chicory- / black, like a con game-." Earlier, 's ('dalet') concise but undeniable statement of Willem de Kooning's Door to the River (1960) is related. In this way, saying or writing a letter turns into poetry; the letter, perhaps even, is allowed to find a voice of its own. Yet 's sweet voice is nonessential. Instead, Draw Me After concerns a much wider tradition and dialogue, especially regarding Cole's translations, which alternate with poems devoted to artists and critics, and to people only indicated by their initials. Indeed, the composition secures the effect that the difference between dedication and citation disappears. This must be what Draw Me After means: the poetry arrives from one, moves toward another. The coming together created here between the script of the Old Testament, on one hand, with visual art and poetical exchange on the other, then, amounts to an exceptionally subtle and profound Genesis and Bereshit story, wherein the response that follows is co-original with the voice that it answers. Arthur Willemse Universities of Maastricht and Hasselt Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

성서 히브리어 발음 교육을 위한 제언 — 자음 명칭을 중심으로 —

Students of Biblical Hebrew often complain about how difficult it is to learn the language. Of course, the first and foundational problem lies in mastering the Hebrew alphabet (or aleph-bet), particularly the pronunciation of each letter. The problem of the Masoretic reading system’s notorious difficulty is only next. Overcoming the barrier of properly pronouncing consonants is no doubt the primary matter.BR Beginners of the language have to confront unexpected obstacles when learning Biblical Hebrew consonants. Unlike most other languages, Biblical Hebrew’s original sounds are lost, and its modern pronunciations are diversified because of the complex history of the Jewish diaspora. Moreover, there is no unified method to transliterate Biblical Hebrew into the Korean writing system, which is essential for beginners to understand the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. Such circumstances eventually led Hebrew Bible scholars in Korea to produce introductory grammar books that render the sound of each letter differently in many cases. This eventually made learning the consonants of Biblical Hebrew, which is supposed to be the simplest and clearest subject in learning foreign languages, quite complex and unclear. As many students cannot take the first step, they cannot go any further but give up on learning Biblical Hebrew.BR Instructors’ understanding of the current situation regarding Biblical Hebrew consonant teaching is pivotal. In this paper, I endeavored to provide instructors with key features to consider in teaching Biblical Hebrew consonants. For example, I introduce a comparison of the three main traditions of Hebrew pronunciation, that is, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Yemenite. Then I offer an analysis of seventeen different introductory grammar books that are used in Biblical Hebrew grammar classes in Korea, focusing on consonants in general; their ways of dealing with the name and pronunciation of each letter in particular. Finally, I add my evaluation on the current situation of Biblical Hebrew consonant education based on the textbooks I analyzed, hoping to foster better Biblical Hebrew education.

Breathing, Nostrils, and the Press: Rethinking the Hebrew–Yiddish Axis in the United States, 1870–1900

The early American Yiddish and Hebrew presses had various affinities and bonds. This essay seeks to examine the connections between newspapers written in the Hebrew alphabet in the United States between the 1870s and 1890s and highlight the parallel process of growth undergone by periodicals in both languages. Diverting from standard research in this area that treats the Yiddish and Hebrew presses in the United States as two separate entities, this essay emphasizes the points of contact and proximity between them. It reviews the interconnectedness of the Hebrew and Yiddish presses during its first two decades, emphasizing personalities and material culture, and situates the phenomenon against its broader cultural background. More specifically, it presents a case study—Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals published in Chicago in 1889—and compares the periodicals' content and form. The essay then traces the geographical and cultural bilingual heritage of the publications' founders. By analyzing the features and origins of these contacts, this essay offers a different and more nuanced consideration of the historical perception of Hebrew and Yiddish in the American context.

Evaluating preschoolers’ references to characteristics of the Hebrew orthography via a computerized early spelling game

Abstract The current study evaluated how characteristics of Hebrew, a Semitic language with an abjad writing system, are manifested in Hebrew-speaking preschoolers’ play with a computerized spelling game adapted for Hebrew. The game words were of different lengths and structures so as to include the entire Hebrew alphabet and all the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) in all possible positions in the word (first, last, second). We analyzed the 18,720 spellings typed by 96 preschoolers aged 5;7 years (on average) who played the game during eight sessions (about 20 minutes per session) in one month. The study indicated a greater difficulty in spelling א, ה, ו, י letters as consonants than as vowels, and more success in spelling ב, כ, פ letters that are pronounced as stops, as compared to the same letters that are pronounced as spirants. The success in spelling consonants and consonant-vowel letters was identical. Within a word, there was greater success in spelling the first letter, than in spelling the last letter, and the second letter. The length of the word did not influence success in spelling the first, second, or last letter in the word. At the same time, spelling an entire shorter word was easier than spelling an entire longer word. Lastly, spelling of words to which children had more exposures was easier than spelling words with only a single exposure. The discussion focuses on the implications of the study and refers to the nature of appropriate literacy-oriented digital Hebrew games and activities with preschoolers.

Kabała a mistycyzm

The article "Kabbalah and mysticism" is divided into three parts, in which the general understanding of Kabbalah based on mysticism is presented. The first is devoted to the general definition of mysticism, wanting to reflect on this: Is Kabbalah one? In order to be able to answer this question, the author gives voice to the more important scholars of Judaism who have dealt with this issue or are still dealing with it. They are clearly characterizing what mysticism is, they try to create an equivalent explanation of Kabbalah, thus showing its specificity. Once confirmed that Kabbalah can be considered a kind of mysticism, the author moves on to the second part, in which she presents the basic sources of mysticism of Kabbalah. It discusses the most important items of rabbinic and non-rabbinic literature, showing how the non-rabbinic is continuator of the rabbinic. The third part of the article focuses on a deeper description of the initial types of mysticism: creation, chariot and body, which form the foundation for the later mysticism of word and letter. The mysticism of words and letters is kabbalah, that is, the hermeneutical art of biblical exegesis, based on the properties of the Hebrew alphabet and language, as God's tool for knowing Him. The article is based on the considerations of such authors as: Gershom Scholem, Roland Goetschel, Joseph Dan, Charles Mopsik, Marc-Alain Ouaknin, or the controversial Moshe Idel.

Is the Study of Hebrew Useless for Orthodox Theologians? A Response to Some Recent Assertions Put Forward by Jean-Claude Larchet

In one of his recent books, Jean-Claude Larchet argued that the study of Hebrew is useless for those doing research in the field of Orthodox theology, since the Church fathers used the Greek version of the Old Testament (Septuagint). There are at least two reasons that might be advanced in order to prove the invalidity of Larchet’s thesis. First, fostering an attitude of ignorance as regards the Hebrew Bible might nurture anti-Judaic beliefs among Orthodox students, considering that such attitudes could be noticed in Romania during the interwar period. Second, the Fathers of the Church had a favorable attitude towards Hebrew, despite the fact that few of them actually knew that language. They held the belief that Hebrew was the primordial language through which God spoke to mankind in the beginning and through which the Old Testament was revealed. Both the Hebrew language and the Hebrew alphabet played a significant role in their theoretical considerations on the canon of the Holy Scripture. Since Larchet published his work in Romanian, his theses and their implications are discussed from the perspective and in the context of Romanian Orthodox theology.

A parallel between the first verse of the biblical genesis, the poem “The Secret Rose Garden” and the Sephirotic Tree of Kabbalah

This article proposes a study on the border between comparative literature and the hermeneutics of symbols. Although the traditional literature of the Middle East offers many possibilities, the context of the analysis will focus mainly on a parallel between the representation of the Sephirotic Tree of Kabbalah (also called the Tree of Life) and certain verses from the poem “The Secret Rose Garden” written by Mahmūd Shabestarī. At the same time, we will use as a link between the two contexts a symbolic interpretation of the first verse of the biblical genesis. Along with highlighting some of the peculiarities involved in deciphering the Hebrew alphabet, this approach aims at an approach that facilitates the transition from a type of intellectual Kabbalah to a reception related to intuitive Kabbalah. Consequently, the comparative literature appears more as a pretext for contextualizing the method of approach, as well as for presenting illustrative examples.

Listening to difference: J.G. Herder’s aural theory of cultural diversity in the ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772)

ABSTRACT In this article, I develop the concept and practice of ‘listening to difference,’ examining J.G. Herder’s aural theory of cultural diversity as primarily worked out in the ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772). I examine the sources Herder critiqued to outline his aural theory of linguistic and cultural difference, which have thus far only been summarily mentioned if at all in scholarship despite the prominence of the ‘Treatise’ in intellectual history and philosophy. These sources comprise the travelogues of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French scientists, mathematicians, diplomats, and Jesuit missionaries who described the inadequacy of Romanized orthography to accurately transcribe the sounds and pronunciations of the indigenous peoples they encountered throughout the Americas, Thailand, and China. Herder’s critical readings of travelogues showcased the unintended failures and interruptions in European colonial practices of listening. I argue that it was the French travellers’ failure to erase difference, to transform it into identity or, in other words, into a universalist monolingualism, which produced a consciousness of cultural and linguistic difference, even if repressed. The sounds of the spoken indigenous languages exposed the limits of the paradigms of Catholic and European linguistic classification. Instead, the exemplary technologies for preserving difference in scriptural and listening practices were for Herder the Hebrew alphabet and the oral transmission of poetry in ancient and Indigenous cultures. Listening to difference, as I define it, involves an openness to listening to the voices and sounds of the othered by listeners who recognize their distinct situated, embodied positionalities. It offers alternate possibilities to conceive of human diversity as continually in formation and not as a static or progressive hierarchy.

Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi

Reviewed by: Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History ed. by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi Norman Vance (bio) Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi; pp. xxvii + 285. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2020, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History is exciting and scholarly. This edited collection by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi shows how the Victorians could travel in imagination through time and space, above and beneath the earth and under the sea. They could draw on the work not just of historians but of geologists, geographers, oceanographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, and more-or-less well-informed fantasists such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The twelve chapters travel widely across different disciplines, using ideas of time to illuminate many facets of the Victorian knowledge explosion, from the age of the earth to the ambivalences of the new machine age, from Anglo-Saxon poetry and biblical scholarship to submarines and deep-sea cables. Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1876) is used in Clare Pettitt's chapter "At Sea," and Wellsian fantasy is briefly mentioned by Daniel Wilson in the concluding chapter on "How We Got Here," but Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and the time traveler who uses it are oddly absent. So is Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), which was inspired by geology and paleontology, which brought prehistoric creatures back to life and paved the way for later dinosaur fantasies such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park (1993). Despite some helpful cross-referencing, the sheer range and diversity of encounters with time and history described in the book present problems of coherence. Rachel Bryant Davies's "Through the Proscenium Arch," an entertaining chapter on children's toy-theater focused on a cheerfully jumbled version of "The Siege of Troy" (a popular 1833 equestrian re-enactment), is interesting in itself, but it is a long way from the seemingly grown-up science and apparent high seriousness of other chapters. At first sight the four sections labelled "Narratives," "Origins," "Time in Transit," and "Unfinished Business" do not seem to have very much to do with each other. But Romanticism, particularly the Romantic quest and the Romantic cult of mystery and gothic strangeness, provides an understated continuity or common thread, even if the quests of scholars, scientists, and spiritualists were often inconclusive and the dawning awareness of complex antecedents and of unimaginable antiquity disconcertingly eroded earlier certainties. As Michael Ledger-Lomas observes in his chapter "On Pilgrimage," "the venerable urge to be a pilgrim shaped how Victorians thought about the passage of time and the scholarly investigation of time" (157). This extended to geological time. Well-travelled Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) read about geology and made imaginative use of it, as Clare Pettitt observes. The influential geologist Charles Lyell, a contemporary of the younger Romantics, read his Byron, while Victorians such as the Tennyson of In Memoriam (1850) read their Lyell and found no comfort in the abysses of geological time that he disclosed. Simon Goldhill makes a valiant attempt to hold things together in an ambitious chapter on the quest for origins, "Ad Fontes." His title invokes Erasmus and, behind him, the Latin Bible. Goldhill contrasts humanist delight in Greek culture as the source or fountainhead of all knowledge with the sadder and wiser Victorian acceptance of the [End Page 585] elusiveness of their quest for ultimate sources and the destabilizing nature of the enterprise. A classical scholar himself, he draws on the history of textual scholarship, both classical and biblical, to illustrate the point. Special textual authority attaches to the original manuscript, but the original manuscripts of ancient texts have not survived. One of the great discoveries in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship was Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library, a fourth-century manuscript containing the earliest surviving text of the entire New Testament. Its scholarly primacy is indicated by identifying it as "aleph," the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, though the manuscript was a...

"Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss (review)

Reviewed by: "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss Alessia Bellusci Tzahi Weiss. "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 208 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000210 Sefer Yeẓirah (The book of formation) is a Jewish cosmogonic book which focuses on the role of the decimal number system (sefirot) and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the creation and in the created world. Considered a canonical Jewish text since the tenth century—notably, the same period in which the book is first attested—Sefer Yeẓirah became one of the most influential compositions for Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. Unique in style and content, it has attracted remarkable attention both in Jewish and non-Jewish circles, fascinating scholars from various disciplines as well as a broader readership. Despite the rich scholarship devoted to it, Sefer Yeẓirah has not been fully deciphered yet, especially for what concerns its authorship, dating, and ultimate significance. [End Page 452] With his masterful monograph, Tzahi Weiss offers a clever new interpretation and contextualization of Sefer Yeẓirah, which, for the first time, takes into account and interrelates the actual subject of the book, its textual tradition, and its reception history. The identification of the precise interest of Sefer Yeẓirah in the speculation on the twenty-two Hebrew letters and their creative powers enables Weiss to draw solid comparisons with Syriac Christian literature, and, ultimately, to trace the intellectual matrix from which the book developed. Weiss shows how the nuances of the linguistic, physiologic, astrological, and cosmological notions displayed in the text point to a sophisticated late antique Jewish tradition that cannot be identified with rabbinic Judaism. Challenging the main theories on the time and context of Sefer Yeẓirah, he convincingly demonstrates that the book was "written and edited around the seventh century by Jews who were familiar with Syriac Christianity" (2). Showing how the history of the text is interwoven with its reception, Weiss argues for the existence of a mystical-mythical-magical interpretation of Sefer Yeẓirah prior to the twelfth century. The idea that late antique and early medieval Judaism was much more nuanced than the monolithic and rabbinocentric portrait outlined by a certain type of scholarship is the fil rouge of the book. Weiss situates both the formation and the earliest reception of Sefer Yeẓirah in a nonrabbinic milieu, showing that the text not only crystallized in an intellectual world neatly detached from both rabbinic culture and the known magico-mystical circles spinning in the rabbinic orbit—those that produced the hekhalot literature—but also, already in an early age, was transmitted and interpreted by Jews clearly interested in mysticism and magic and not only by "a limited section of the rabbinical elite" (104). The volume consists of an introduction, five chapters, a short epilogue, and three appendices. The introduction discusses the main issues which complicate a definitive contextualization of Sefer Yeẓirah, explaining how Weiss's theory interconnects with or challenges the most relevant studies on the topic. This section should be read together with appendix 1, which unveils the anachronism of the argument for an Abbasid context for Sefer Yeẓirah. In the first three chapters, Weiss advances his thesis on the composition of Sefer Yeẓirah, starting by demonstrating that—albeit contested by church authorities—letter speculation developed remarkably also in Syriac Christian marginal circles, the specific intellectual environment in which Sefer Yeẓirah was conceived (chapter 1). In his analysis of late antique conceptions on letter speculation, Weiss identifies two main traditions. The first—outlined in chapter 2—resurfaces in rabbinic and hekhalot literature and assumes the creation of the world / seal of the abyss from the ineffable name of God—or, in later articulations, from its specific letters. Within this model—which may be traced back to a Greek/Coptic preference for vowels—the matres lectionis (Hebrew vowels) hold a higher status. Conversely, the second tradition—discussed in chapter 3—conceives the creation of the world from the twenty-two Hebrew letters as a whole and with no hierarchy between vowels and consonants. Completely unattested in rabbinic and...

Targeted Degradation of Proteins — The Ubiquitin System

Proteins are the engines of all forms of life, for humans and for all the plant and animal kingdoms. Proteins are used both to build organs (such as bones, muscles, and skin) and to perform bodily functions. These functions range from digestion (processing food and converting it into energy), to enabling movement and sensation (sight and hearing), to protecting the body from foreign invaders with our antibodies, which are also proteins. What are proteins? They can be compared to words in a language that contains letters. In the Hebrew alphabet, there are 26 letters out of which countless words can be composed. But when we write, we use just a fraction of these infinite options, with the average number of letters in a word ranging between 3 and 8. The biological “protein alphabet” is comprised of 20 “letters” called amino acids, which are the building blocks of the proteins that make up the body. Proteins are chains of amino acid, linked together in a specific order governed by the DNA. Unlike the words of a spoken language, the average protein consists of hundreds of amino acids. The extensive length of proteins and the chemical composition of the amino acids make proteins sensitive to many factors, such as high temperatures, radiation, and chemicals. All these factors damage proteins and alter their fragile structures, negatively affecting how they function. When proteins are damaged or when they finish performing their functions and are no longer needed, the body breaks them down. With my doctoral adviser, Prof. Avram Hershko, and our research collaborator, Prof. Irwin Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, we discovered the mechanism responsible for targeted degradation of proteins in cells. This degradation can recognize damaged proteins or proteins that are not needed anymore, while leaving intact the “healthy,” functional ones. This mechanism is called the ubiquitin system after its principal protein, ubiquitin, which was the first protein we discovered in the system. Ubiquitin’s role is to tag undesirable proteins so that the cell’s “grinder” can recognize them and break them down, enabling the cell to function normally. In this article, we will explain the story of proteins and the ubiquitin system that we discovered in a study that earned us, among other prizes, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004.

GIORDANO BRUNO AND JEWISH THOUGHT: RECEPTION AND REINTERPRETATION

This article is focused on the philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and the references to Jewish culture in his oeuvre. We discuss about Bruno’s reception of Jewish thought and describe this subject in a comprehensive way. We highlight Bruno’s view on the Jews and their religion, also explaining the reasons behind his polemic against the Jewish people. Furthermore, we underline the influence of the Kabbalistic tradition and Jewish philosophy on various aspects of Brunian thought. Specifically, we discuss about the use of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in Bruno’s works on the art of memory, the relation between Brunian infinitist cosmology and Kabbalistic concepts such as ensoph and the ten sephirot, the relation between Brunian thought and the philosophical theories of Avicebron, Moses Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas and Leo the Hebrew.

Medieval Basque Phonology through Hebrew Texts in Christian Spain: A Study of Basque Sibilants Written in Hebrew Aljamía

AbstractThe study of phonetics and phonology in the medieval period is particularly difficult, since the preserved text, which is an essential working tool, is not always as precise as we would like it to be. The task is even more complicated when we do research on an unwritten language as is the case of Basque in the medieval period. As the Basque language did not have its writing system at the time, it was written in Romance script, which not always matched Basque sounds. This study puts forward a new source of information that brings in new data. We will add knowledge to the study of medieval Basque phonology through Basque texts written with Hebrew script from manuscripts preserved in the General Archive of Navarre. We will also try to show that the use of the Hebrew alphabet in specific cases, such as the affricate‐fricative contrast, can help to endorse trends in certain linguistic phenomena of the Basque language, hitherto intuited by other means.

Alphabet Books: Relations Between Aspects of Parent-Child Shared Reading, Children’s Motivation, and Early Literacy Skills

The study examined aspects of parent-child shared reading interactions of two Hebrew alphabet books, children’s motivation to engage in early literacy activities, and how these variables relate to children’s early literacy skills. Participants were 44 children (32 girls, 12 boys) aged 4.6 to 6.6 years (M = 5.6, SD = 0.54) and one parent (42 mothers, 2 fathers). Results revealed that parents made more references to the writing system than to the content or illustrations in the books, which was positively related to children’s early literacy skills. Children were highly motivated to engage in literacy activities, which were related to their skills. Yet shared reading contributed to children’s early literacy skills, beyond motivation. Across various languages, including alphabet books in shared reading interactions may help support children’s early literacy development.

A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders

Reviewed by: A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders Jack Lynch (bio) A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders. New York: Basic Books, 2020. Pp. xxviii + 319. $30.00. ISBN: 978-1-5416-7507-0. A Place for Everything advertises itself as a history of alphabetical order, but that's not strictly true. Alphabetical order is a historian's nightmare: we have no evidence about where it came from. We learn our ABCs because the Romans learned their ABCs because the Greeks learned their ABΓs because the Phoenicians learned their ālep-bēt-gīmls because the Northern Canaanites learned whatever they learned—and why they learned it that way, nobody knows. As far back as our evidence takes us, the letters had an order. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Psalms 9 and 10 form an alphabetical acrostic, with pairs of lines beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet: the first two verses start with aleph, the next two with beth, and so on. And as the alphabet was adapted for use in languages as diverse as Aramaic, Greek, Icelandic, Russian, Coptic, and Finnish, its order stayed remarkably consistent. Yet virtually no one seems to have made any use of that order for millennia. When asked why there was any order at all, we fall back on the faute-de-mieux explanation that the order was simply a mnemonic for learning the complete roster of letters. If A Place for Everything isn't a book about the order of the alphabet, what is it? In fact it's a book about managing information more generally, and particularly the ways the alphabet has made that possible. But it was a long struggle. Flanders is especially good in discussing when and why alphabetical order was not used, or was resisted, even after it was available. Why is the Domesday Book, for instance, a list of 13,418 places, organized "first by status, then by geography, then by status [End Page 281] again, and finally by wealth" (xxi-xxii)? What could motivate anyone to use such a nightmare of complexity when the alphabet was just waiting to be used? Flanders makes the case that the alphabet implies an ideology that many found disturbing. The greatest virtue of alphabetical order is that it is entirely arbitrary: there is nothing intrinsic to abacuses or zygotes that keeps them thousands of pages apart. But the greatest vice of alphabetical order is also that it is entirely arbitrary: things are near or far from one another for no intrinsic reasons. For many people it violated good sense that father, mother, son, daughter, parent, and child should be scattered all over the dictionary while strand, stranger, strangle, strap, and stratagem are huddled together on the same page. Even worse, the alphabet's arbitrariness wrecks hierarchies by forcing the greatest to jostle together with the least. The thought that the Supreme Being should lodge between go-cart and Godzilla, while the lowly aardvark takes pride of place on page one, was more than many could tolerate. As Flanders puts it, God had created a hierarchical world, and those who followed him reflected that hierarchy in their work. Alphabetical order looked like resistance, even rebellion, against the order of divine creation. Or possibly ignorance: an author who placed angeli, angels, before deus, God, simply because A comes before D, was an author who had failed to comprehend the order of the universe. (33) Why, then, did we change our minds and eventually come over to alphabetical order? The question has no single answer, and Flanders does not pretend it does, but she outlines many factors that may have contributed to its adoption. The Middle Ages saw the rapid growth of libraries, and print would only accelerate the trend, as people had to shift from intensive reading of a few texts to the extensive consulting of many. The growing sophistication of civil and ecclesiastical authorities also played a part: when governments and churches decided to keep records of every citizen, every soldier, every cleric, every student, every tax payment, every municipal regulation, every road, every shop...

Mendengar dengan Mata Berkatekese dalam Ecclesia Domestica

This article talks about “doing catechesis in ecclesia domes­tica - Grounded Theory’s perspective.” Learning the form (Gestalt) of silence in Eastern tradition in terms of Hebraic tradition in the Sacred Scripture, we find out that human-divine interaction in the first Hebrew alphabet of aleph is a simple, relevant and attractive model. Parents can use it in doing catechesis with their kids under five years old. Translanguaging proses in this period requires parents to learn something from their kids. Parents became “students” of their kids. In this very young age, their kids are the live and the holy text (data). “Catechesis Model of Aleph,” as we prefer to say it, will be bring the kids to parents, and by doing this the kids will bring the parents to the kids own-selves as well. This catechesis model is a learning model, not a teaching one. Through “hearing vision” besides “seeing voice,” the parents as well as the kids will be sensitive enough to distinguish “I” from “me” – the basic interaction form in every person. However, human-divine interaction represented by aleph is spiritual. In human life experience, is the aleph discovered or invented? Aleph is just an alphabet, but what it points to is really unsayable. As a human-divine interaction, by the way, aleph is the basic model of doing catechesis. This model can inform, perform, and even transform human soul. Parents as well as kids can enter into this human-divine interaction to experience and understand human languaging. The form (Gestalt) is there. It enters, it changes, and it transcendends human life. “Hearing vision” (mendengar bentuk dalam ruang penglihatan) is a dramatic praxis in daily life.