Speaking Hebrew: Studies in the Spoken Language and in Linguistic Variation in Israel. [Hebrew] (review)

Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 366 Reviews With one exception, all the manuscripts included in the catalogue are Sephardic. Many are elegant, exquisite codices copied before 1492. The fact that so very few Hebrew manuscripts are found in the Peninsula makes these surviving volumes especially precious. Beyond the bibliographic data on the manuscripts this catalogue provides, it also opens a door to the lives of those who wrote, copied, and exchanged the codices. Very prominent among them was the convert Alfonso de Zamora, whose divided life between Christianity and Judaism is best expressed in his Spanish translation of David K . imhi’s Commentary on Isaiah (cat. no. 38, plate p. 268) and his contemporary, Cardinal Cisneros, whose efforts resulted in the acquisition and preservation of many of the manuscripts included in the catalogue. Esperanza Alfonso University of Wisconsin—Madison Madison, WI 53706 mealfonso@facstaff.wisc.edu SPEAKING HEBREW: STUDIES IN THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND IN LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN ISRAEL. [HEBREW]. Edited by Shlomo Izre√el and Margalit Mendelson. Tefiuda 18. Pp. xvi + 477 + 55*. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2002. Cloth, $50.00. Ever since I heard Shlomo Izre√el, Tel Aviv University faculty member and project director of The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), give a presentation about this new project at the 2000 meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, I have been eagerly awaiting the appearance of this volume. CoSIH aspires to be nothing less than “the compilation of a comprehensive corpus of Israeli Hebrew,” to quote the project ’s website (www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/cosih.html). For anyone interested in Israeli Hebrew, from almost any research perspective, the potential of this resource is stunning. Speaking Hebrew is built around the papers presented at an international symposium on Corpus Linguistics and the Study of Modern Hebrew, held on February 3–4, 2000 at Emory University in Atlanta, academic home of CoSIH’s principal investigator, Benjamin Hary. In addition to the majority of the symposium papers, Speaking Hebrew contains an almost equal number of new offerings. As with any volume of this nature, there are papers that delight, papers that adequately serve their purpose, and papers that disappoint. Following a short forward by Yair Hoffman, editor of the Tefiuda series, and a preface by Shlomo Izre√el, editor of Tefiuda 18, the volume is divided Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 367 Reviews into five sections. The articles are in Hebrew, accompanied by a set of abstracts in English. (Note that an English version, entitled Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew: Towards the Compilation of The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), edited by Benjamin Hary [pp. xi + 241. Tel Aviv University, 2003. Cloth, $35.00] and containing about half of these same pieces, is also available.) Speaking Hebrew opens with a three-article section entitled “Corpus Linguistics and Computational Linguistics.” John Sinclair’s first essay, “Corpus Linguistics: The State of the Art,” is a useful discussion of the issues of size and types of annotation that are at the core of the productive use of language corpora. His second piece, “Lexical Grammar: A New Look at Language ,” explains the concept of “lexical grammar,” a linguistic methodology that has arisen from the experiences of linguists who have utilized the existing large language corpora. Their work suggests that the canonical division between syntax and semantics is not, in fact, necessary or even useful to productive research based on corpora. Finally, the article by Shuly Wintner, “Hebrew Computational Linguistics: Past and Future,” is a very well organized composition, focusing on computer applications for linguistic knowledge. The second section of the volume is entitled “Language and Society in Israel” and is composed of four articles: “Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in Israel” by Eliezer Ben-Rafael, “Hebrew among the Arabs in Israel: Sociolinguistic Aspects” by Muhammad Amara, “The Corpus of Spoken Palestinian Arabic (COSPA) [sic]” by Otto Jastrow, and “From Monolingual to Multilingual? Educational Language Policy in Israel” by Elana Shohamy and Bernard Spolsky. While Ben-Rafael gives a satisfactory overview of the subject at hand and Jastrow offers a competent description of another language corpus project, the articles by Amara, on the one hand, and Shohamy and Spolsky, on the other...