501 Hebrew Verbs (review)

REVIEWS 501 HEBREW VERBS. By Shmuel Bolozky. Pp. xvii + 910. Hauppage, NY: Barron's, 1996. Paper, $12.95. Few Hebrew teaching resources have been so overdue and are so welcome as Shmuel Bolozky's edition of Barron's 501 Hebrew Verbs. The student's first impression of this revamped, double-the-size version of Barron's 201 Hebrew Verbs may, admittedly, be one of mild panic. The thought that it takes a 900-page tome to master the inflection of the modem Hebrew verb is not a reassuring one. Teachers would thus be well advised to impress on their classes that this is above all a work of reference-and an invaluable one-for checking the inflection of any common verb and that the rules of thumb for arriving at these inflections are for the most part fairly simple and available in any up-to-date Hebrew grammar. In the course of time, the great Hebrew public has simplified many things: possessive inflections in the noun, the tense and aspect system, and object suffixes in the verb, to name just a few. But the verbal inflections and the system of binyanim are as solid a barrier as ever, the great Semitic feature on the landscape for all who might be misled by talk that Hebrew is really a European language. It is deplorable, then, that we have had to make do for so long with hopelessly outdated verb tables, dictionaries that tell just a fraction of the truth, and grammars that cannot distinguish biblical Hebrew from the contemporary idiom. Bolozky, one of Israel's most distinguished analysts of the verb, a theoretical phonologist, and an experienced teacher of Hebrew at the University of Massachusetts, was the ideal person to create this new edition for Barron's, bringing our verb tables up-to-date and making some sense of them. The book presents full inflections for hundreds of frequently used verbs, grouped by root. Besides past, present, future, infinitive, infinitive absolute, and imperative, it lists any action nominals (gerunds), passive participles, and governed prepositions. For completeness' sake, any other verbs derived from these roots are briefly noted, however uncommon, indicating whether they are obsolete and to which historical period they belong. Entries are arranged clearly and attractively. To allow the book to function as a kind of leamer's dictionary of verbs, Bolozky translates each verb, gives a few Hebrew sentences to illustrate how it is used, and lists anything from a handful to a long list of special expressions featuring the verb. Equally helpful, the book ends with three indices: English-Hebrew Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 90 Reviews verbs. Hebrew-English verbs entered according to stem (e.g.• nital verbs under nun). and Hebrew-English roots. All the inflections are given in plene spelling with full nikkud. in a large. clear font. There is a thirteen-page introduction explaining the workings of the system of roots and binyanim and illustrating how the book is organized. It is a pleasure (and. I dare say. a shock to many Ivrit teachers) to find the binyanim explained realistically: Aside from pu'al and hUf'al being the passive of pi'el and hif'il. the semantic relations between binyanim involve "little regularity" (p. xii) except among particularly common or recently coined verbs. "Sweeping semantic generalizations about the total verb system would be inappropriate" (p. xv). Thus pa'al covers "a wide semantic array:' Nital and hitpa'el verbs that do relate to another verb in the system are usually reflexive, inchoative/resultative, passive. or reciprocaVmutual. Indeed. "whenever the focus is on the recipient of the action. or the entity undergoing the action/change. forms tend to be realized either in hitpa'el or nital," whereas verbs focusing on a deliberate agent "tend to be" ptel or hitil. with the latter "often" preferred for causative actions. How nice if this message were to filter down into the classroom. I fear. however, that the introduction is for the most part too academic ("discontinuous canonical pattern," "a syllable-final n that assimilates") for students and even for many teachers. I also waited in vain for the author to nail the widespread misconception that roots have clear...