The present volume reproduces two still unsurpassed accounts of the flourish and eventual decline of Hebrew linguistic scholarship covering the period from the 10th to the 16th century, at a time when Christian scholars and theologians – as a result of the Reformation with its emphasis on the authority of the Bible – began to study Hebrew. These studies are Wilhelm Bacher’s Die Anfänge der hebräischen Grammatik (Leipzig 1895) and Die hebräische Sprachwissenschaft vom X. bus zum XVI. Jahrhundert (Trier 1892). In addition, this volume contains a bibliography of Bacher’s writings, compiled by his pupil and successor Ludwig Blau and supplemented in 1928 by Dénes Friedman, and an introductory article by Jack Fellman.

Biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea and the Cairo Genizah have added immeasurably to our knowledge of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. The papers collected in this volume compare the evidence of the biblical DSS with manuscripts from the Vienna Papyrus Collection, connected with the Cairo Genizah, as well as late ancient evidence from diverse contexts. The resulting picture is one of a dialectic between textual plurality and fixity: the eventual dominance of the consonantal Masoretic Text over the textual plurality of the Second Temple period, and the secondary diversification of that standardized text through scribal activity.

In the first few centuries of Islam, Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all faced the challenges of preserving their holy texts in the midst of a changing religious landscape. This situation led Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew scholars to develop new fields of linguistic science in order to better analyse the languages of the Bible and the Qurʾān. Part of this work dealt with the issue of vocalisation in Semitic scripts, which lacked the letters required to precisely record all the vowels in their languages. Semitic scribes thus developed systems of written vocalisation points to better record vowel sounds, first in Syriac, then soon after in Arabic and Hebrew. These new points opened a new field of linguistic analysis, enabling medieval grammarians to more easily examine vowel phonology and explore the relationships between phonetics and orthography. Many aspects of this new field of vocalisation crossed the boundaries between religious communities, first with the spread of ‘relative’ vocalisation systems prior to the eighth century, and later with the terminology created to name the discrete vowels of ‘absolute’ vocalisation systems. This book investigates the theories behind Semitic vocalisation and vowel phonology in the early medieval Middle East, tracing their evolution to identify points of intellectual contact between Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew linguists before the twelfth century.

The aim of this study is a comparative analysis of the role of semantics in the linguistic theory of four grammatical traditions, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic. If one compares the organization of linguistic theory in various grammatical traditions, it soon turns out that there are marked differences in the way they define the place of ‘semantics’ within the theory. In some traditions, semantics is formally excluded from linguistic theory, and linguists do not express any opinion as to the relationship between syntactic and semantic analysis. In other traditions, the whole basis of linguistic theory is semantically orientated, and syntactic features are always analysed as correlates of a semantic structure. However, even in those traditions, in which semantics falls explicitly or implicitly outside the scope of linguistics, there may be factors forcing linguists to occupy themselves with the semantic dimension of language. One important factor seems to be the presence of a corpus of revealed/sacred texts: the necessity to formulate hermeneutic rules for the interpretation of this corpus brings semantics in through the back door.

This volume presents a selection of – slightly revised versions – of papers from the third International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS III), Princeton, 1984. The papers are organized under the following headings: I Generalia; II Classical Period; III Medieval Period; IV Renaissance; V 17th Century; VI 18th Century; VII 19th Century, and VIII 20th Century. Contributors include W. Keith Percival, Aron Dotan, Michael G. Carter, Kees Versteegh, Brian Ó Cuív, Francis P. Dinneen, Manuel Breva-Claramonte, Douglas A. Kibbee, Joseph L. Subbiondo, Rüdiger Schreyer, Marc Wilmet, Robert H. Robins, Jean Rousseau, Ramón Sarmiento, Edward Stankiewicz, Irmengard Rauch, Talbot J. Taylor, Julie Andresen, and many others.

Much is known about the grammar of the modistae and about its eclipse; this book sets out to trace its rise. In the late eleventh century grammar became an analytical rather than an exegetical discipline under the impetus of the new theology. Under the impetus of Arab learning the ancient sciences were reshaped according to the norms of Aristotle’s Analytics, and developed within a structure of speculative sciences beginning with grammar and culminating in theology. Though the modistae acknowledge Aristotle, Donatus, Priscian and the Arab commentators, their roots also lie in Augustine and Boethius, and they took as much from their scholastic contemporaries as they gave them. This book traces the genesis of a grammar which communicated freely with other speculative sciences, shared their structures and methods, and affirmed its own individuality by defining its object as the causes of language.

What is 'American' about American linguistics? Is Jakobson, who spent half his life in America, part of it? What became of Whitney's genuinely American conception of language as a democracy? And how did developments in 20th-century American linguistics relate to broader cultural trends?This book brings together 15 years of research by John E. Joseph, including his discovery of the meeting between Whitney and Saussure, his ground-breaking work on the origins of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' and of American sociolinguistics, and his seminal examination of Bloomfield and Chomsky as readers of Saussure. Among the original findings and arguments contained herein: • why 'American structuralism' does not end with Chomsky, but begins with him; • how Bloomfield managed to read Saussure as a behaviourist avant la lettre; • why in the long run Skinner has emerged victorious over Chomsky; • how Whorf was directly influenced by the mystical writings of Madame Blavatsky; • how the Whitney–Max Müller debates in the 19th century connect to the intellectual disparity between Chomsky's linguistic and political writings.