- Full Text
- Scholarly Journal
Reviews of books -- Tiberian Hebrew Phonology by Joseph L. Malone
Full text preview
Tiberian Hebrew Phonology. By JOSEPH L. MALONE. Winona Lake, Inc.: EISENBRAUNS, 1993. Pp. x + 204. $45.
Tiberian Hebrew Phonology (hereafter THP) is a difficult book to review.* As outlined in the three introductions (1978, 1984, and 1988), it represents an essentially unchanged version of a phonology of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), prepared for private distribution in the late 1970s. Because of this history, THP is a challenging volume for readers not well versed in both Biblical Hebrew and the generative phonology of the early 1970s, epitomized by Chomsky and Halle (1968). The glossary of linguistic terminology, compiled for this published edition by M. O'Connor, should prove useful for readers who need refreshing on phonological theory. Most forms cited appear in Hebrew orthography and in morphological, phonotogical, and approximate phonetic transcription. Consequently, THP is as accessible to readers who cannot read Hebrew as it is to those who can. There are several reasons that THP is so challenging. One is Malone's elevated and idiosyncratic vocabulary. More importantly, THP is challenging because of its completeness. Malone's goal is a complete characterization of the phonology of TH. While this seems a self-evident goal, it is rare to find such a complete treatment in a single volume: only Chomsky and Halle (1968), on English, and, to a lesser extent, Chomsky (1951), on Hebrew, come to mind. A consequence of this complete coverage is terse exposition. Because the book is organized around rules rather than phenomena, it is often difficult to see how particular phenomena might be treated. Much paging back and forth is often required to trace a phenomenon to its rule.
As Anderson (1985) reminds us, a complete phonology consists of representations of different sorts and rules that act on or link these representations. THP deals primarily with the rules of TH. The...