What I miss most, living in Israel, is easy access to English-language books. There are no large English-language bookstores, as far as I know. And while I’m a big fan of Amazon, I can’t replicate the experience of bookstore browsing on their site (though in other ways it’s better than a bricks-and-mortar bookstore). Moreover, when I do order from Amazon, the extra shipping and taxes raise the price considerably.
My in-laws have been visiting for the past week or so (which is why my posting output has declined so precipitously – though I did make time to respond to my denbestelanche) and I took the opportunity to order a number of books from Amazon to be sent domestically to my guests before their visit. On the advice of Amritas, I ordered The World's Major Languages, by Bernard Comrie. It consists of short descriptions of some 50 languages. I haven’t had much time to enjoy it yet, but I did read the entry on Hebrew.
My interest in linguistics is part of a larger interest in systems. I love systems in general, and languages are systems for expressing things that people want to say. My interest in language is largely a curiosity about the different ways such systems can be, and have been, constructed.
Each essay is short, so the author has to pick and choose which features of the language to present. By far, the most interesting aspect of Hebrew, in my opinion, is its root-and-pattern morphology, which was presented in the introduction to Semitic languages as a whole. However, even there I don’t think that the author did a very good job of getting it across, part of the problem being that he felt compelled (I suppose) to use data from many Semitic languages, which obscured the nature of the system. I hope to present my own comprehensive summary in a future post.
One of the things that I look for are elegant solutions to linguistic issues – the Semitic root-and-pattern morphology being one of them. The meaning of elegant, as I am using it (and as mathematicians and engineers use it) is hard to explain, but it is something like, “a simple solution to a complex problem”.
An example that I happened across is the Hungarian local case system. It has a neat arrangement of suffixes.
| Stationary | Approach | Depart | |
| Interior | -ben (in) | -be (into) | -bol (out of) |
| Surface | -n (on) | -re (on to) | -rol (from on) |
| Proximity | -nel (near) | -hoz (to near) | -tol (from near) |
The translations in parenthesis don’t appear in the text – they are my guesses as to the meaning based on the examples given.
Watch this space for more.