The first treatises on Hebrew grammar appear in the High Middle Ages, in the context of Midrash (a method of interpreting and studying the Hebrew Bible). The Karaite tradition originated in AbbasidBaghdad around the 7th century. The Diqduq (10th century) is one of the earliest grammatical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.[1]
Through the influence of Johannes Buxtorf (d. 1629) a serious attempt was made to understand the post-Biblical literature, and many of the most important works were translated into Latin. Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar appeared in 1813.
The Hebrew language is subdivided by era, with significant differences apparent between the varieties. All varieties, from Biblical to Modern, use a typically Semitic templatic morphology with triconsonantal stems, though Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew have significant borrowed components of the lexicon that do not fit into this pattern. Verbal morphology has remained relatively unchanged, though Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew have lost some modal distinctions of Biblical Hebrew and created others through the use of auxiliary verbs.
Significant syntactic changes have arisen in Modern Hebrew as a result of non-Semitic substrate influences. In particular:
In Biblical Hebrew, possession is normally expressed with status constructus, a construction in which the possessed noun occurs in a phonologically reduced, "construct" form and is followed by the possessor noun in its normal, "absolute" form. Modern Hebrew tends to reserve this construction for phrases where the two components form a unified concept, whereas ordinary possession is more commonly expressed analytically with the preposition shel 'of' (etymologically consisting of the relativizer she- 'that' and the preposition le- 'to').[5][6]
Possession in pronouns is expressed with pronominal suffixes added to the noun. Modern Hebrew tends to reserve this for a limited number of nouns, but usually prefers to use the preposition shel, as in the previous case.[7]
Biblical Hebrew often expresses a pronoun direct object by appending a pronominal suffix directly to the verb, as an alternative to appending it to the preposition that signals a definite direct object. The latter construction is the one generally used in Modern Hebrew.[7]
The tense–aspect that is formed by prefixes could denote either the present (especially frequentative) or the future, as well as frequentative past in Biblical Hebrew (some scholars argue that it simply denoted imperfective aspect), while in modern Hebrew it is always future. The suffixed form denotes what is commonly translated as past in both cases, though some scholars argue that it denoted perfective aspect.[8]
Biblical Hebrew employs the so-called waw consecutive construction, in which the conjunction "and" seemingly reverses the tense of a verb (though its exact meaning is a matter of debate). This is not typical of Modern Hebrew.[9]
The default word order in Biblical Hebrew is VSO, while Modern Hebrew is SVO.[10]
However, most Biblical Hebrew constructions are still permissible in Modern Hebrew in formal, literary, archaic or poetic style.
Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar
