Lexical Root vs. Substantive Root: The Status of the Hebrew Alphabet As A Precursory System for Menaḥem Ben Saruq's Root Concept

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-434
Author(s):  
Luba R Charlap
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
The Status ◽  
Abstract Level ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Spanish Soil ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Morphological System

Abstract Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, tenth century) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew - called the Maḥberet - on Spanish soil. His role in the development of Hebrew grammar, however, has not been given pride of place in the scholarly literature. Renewed interest in his theory arose only in the late twentieth century. As some scholars have noted, Menaḥem was the first to reveal the three-consonantal basis of Hebrew roots. This article will continue to establish the basis for this concept, while further elaborating on several emphases in his teaching, especially in the context of the distinction between the radical and the servile letters and their subdivision, which, in our view, led Menaḥem to formulate his root concept. Following our analysis, we note a difference between the ‘lexical root’ concept, by which he arranged the entries in his Maḥberet, and the ‘substantive root’ concept on which he based his innovation. A parallel idea can be seen in the theory of Yusuf Ibn Nūḥ, who set forth the jawhar concept, which means the basic entity of a word on the abstract level (as opposed to a word-based morphology), as Geoffrey Khan has shown. The article concludes with a clarification of the difference between Menaḥem's theory and that of Judah Ḥayyūj. Despite the enormous development made by Menaḥem, he was not able to offer a coherent morphological system, as Ḥayyūj did.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

The Sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim

AJS Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Daniel Reiser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Culture ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThe sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.

The Boy Brahms

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Boman Desai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Original Story ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

During the late twentieth century, the veracity of a particular aspect of Johannes Brahms's boyhood came under challenge. Had he played the piano in Hamburg's dockside bars as many of his biographers had recorded, or had he not? The two sides of the story were debated in the spring 2001 issue of 19th-Century Music. Jan Swafford, Brahms's definitive biographer in English, provided the case for the status quo, citing all the known instances of times when Brahms himself had mentioned the story to friends and biographers. Styra Avins, a translator of many of Brahms's heretofore untranslated letters into English, provided evidence to the contrary by saying all the friends and biographers were mistaken. Swafford's inventory of sources is complete, but there remained more to be said. In "The Boy Brahms" I have attempted to show how Avins's evidence is strictly circumstantial and speculative. At this remove from the incidents in question it can be nothing more. I have attempted to refute the conclusions she has drawn from the young Brahms's handwriting, the testimony of neighbors, and the laws governing attendance in the bars, among other things. I have also attempted to show inconsistencies in Avins's arguments that throw into question her thesis and support the veracity of the original story.

Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.

Late Twentieth-Century Controversies in Sexual Ethics, Gender, and Ordination

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-332
Author(s):  
Lesley Orr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Women's Ordination ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Church

During the second half of the twentieth century, a seismic shift in outlook, norms, behaviours, and laws transformed Western societies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender relations. These changes were characterized and facilitated by escalating rejection of dominant sources of moral authority, including organized religion. This chapter considers the Church of Scotland’s response to the ‘permissive society’. It attempted to grapple theologically with questions concerning marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, confronted unavoidably with profound questions concerning gender, power, and sexuality. These debates generated controversy and division as the moral consensus fractured. Fault lines opened up between conservatives who defended the validity of Christian moral certainties, and others who embraced more liberal and contextual interpretations of Scripture and tradition. Previously silenced or subordinated voices emerged, challenging but failing to provoke radical institutional change at a time of rapid declension in the status and cultural influence of the national Church.

scholarly journals The Postcolonial Crescent

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Islamic Identity ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...

Theoretical Approaches to Anaphora and Pronouns in Biblical Hebrew

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé ◽  
Jacobus A. Naudé
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Generative Linguistics ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Current State ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Apollonius Dyscolus (second century C.E.) defined the pronoun not merely as a noun substitute but implied that a pronoun may refer to nouns anaphorically. The study of Latin scarcely improved the knowledge of anaphora and pronouns and, for centuries, thinking about anaphora and pronouns was essentially limited to the activity of compiling inventories of grammatical categories and virtually no attention was given to the role of anaphora and pronouns in syntax and discourse as such. New insights into the description and explanation of the distribution of anaphora and pronouns in human language came in the late twentieth century with the advent of Chomsky’s generative linguistics. This paper presents the current state of knowledge regarding anaphora and pronouns in Biblical Hebrew as well as the unresolved issues and questions open for further research.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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