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Description:
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Hayyuwj is a 10th century Hebrew scholar and linguist who was born in Fez,
North Africa c945. He migrated to Cordova, Spain c960, where he studied,
taught and wrote on Hebrew linguistics and biblical matters. He died in
around the year 1000. He is a pivotal figure in the history of Hebrew
linguistics, in that he abandoned the traditional linguistics methods and
adopted and adapted the more sophisticated linguistic paradigm developed by
the 8th century Arab grammarians of the School of Basrah. He was the first
Hebrew linguist to apply the newly realized formal linguistic methods to
the analysis of Biblical Hebrew text. He wrote two detailed treatises on
the weak and doubled verbs of Biblical Hebrew: kita:b 'al-'af`a:l dhawa:t
Huru:f 'al-liyn, and kita:b 'al-'af`a:l dhawa:t 'al-mithlayn, and a
treatise on selected biblical topics: kita:b 'al-nutaf. He also wrote this
gem of a treatise on tanqiyt, the textual pointing system of the biblical
text that was developed by the Masoretes to indicate vowels, accents, and
prosodic features in the otherwise purely consonantal system biblical text
and gave it a clear statement and a coherent basis. This is a singular
treatise and one of a kind, written in Arabic about Hebrew vowels, called
Haraka:t 'motions', using the Semitic paradigm of analysis. He wrote
clearly and elegantly on an obscure, intractable and neglected topic that
has engaged the Biblical scholars ever since.
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