Liturgical Hebrew in 13th-15th century Catalonia
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Amos Dodi
Abstract
One of the most important chapters in the history of the Hebrew language is concerned with the ways in which biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew were transmitted in Spain and its cultural sphere in the Middle Ages. From the decline of Hebrew as an everyday spoken language, around the 2nd century CE, until its revival toward the end of the 19th century, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language. This was the case in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. The Jews used the Ibero-Romance language for communication with non-Jews. The Jewish masses acquired the Romance tongue in a random fashion, using it as the vernacular. Hebrew was used mainly as a written language (Schwarzwald 1992: 7). Jews in medieval Catalonia probably spoke Catalan, a Romance language in which two main groups of dialects may be distinguished:
1. Eastern dialects, in the regions of Barcelona, Gerona, Tarragona, the Balearics, etc.
2. Western dialects: Lérida, Valencia.
© 2006 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Abraham Ibn-Ezra's viewpoint regarding the Hebrew language and the biblical text in the context of medieval environment
- Exploring exaptation in language change
- Liturgical Hebrew in 13th-15th century Catalonia
- Nonspecific free relatives and (anti)grammaticalization in English and German
- Bed & Board: The role of alliteration in twin formulas of Middle English prose
- Aspects of punctuation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre
- Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun paradigm: The case of Italian
- Specificational pseudo-clefts in Old Japanese
- Thoughts on the question of Gurage: Now you see it, now you don't
- Lines on an African-Semitic language: The case of Tigrinya
- Michiko Ogura, Verbs of motion in Medieval English
Articles in the same Issue
- Abraham Ibn-Ezra's viewpoint regarding the Hebrew language and the biblical text in the context of medieval environment
- Exploring exaptation in language change
- Liturgical Hebrew in 13th-15th century Catalonia
- Nonspecific free relatives and (anti)grammaticalization in English and German
- Bed & Board: The role of alliteration in twin formulas of Middle English prose
- Aspects of punctuation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre
- Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun paradigm: The case of Italian
- Specificational pseudo-clefts in Old Japanese
- Thoughts on the question of Gurage: Now you see it, now you don't
- Lines on an African-Semitic language: The case of Tigrinya
- Michiko Ogura, Verbs of motion in Medieval English
