Lewis Glinert

AWARD

'The Story of Hebrew' has been named a Finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards 2017 (History)

'The Story of Hebrew' was selected by CHOICE (the magazine of the Association of College & Research Libraries) as one of 55 'Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017'

FALLING IN LOVE

They were big Hebrew letters, mounted on card. I still remember the day I first held them as a five year old in that old London Jewish school, and chanted their names -- like children since time immemorial -- aleph, beis, gimel, daled.

Overnight, it seemed, we were onto Torah, Mishnah, Gemara (no grammar, no dictionaries, just kind of by osmosis). But nothing had prepared me for the surprise of my first trip to Israel. They were actually SPEAKING Hebrew. Me too. ('Buy us two bus tickets', my father whispered. 'shnei kartisim'). What, Hebrew has a word for bus and ticket? At that moment, I fell in love with the Hebrew language.

Ten years later, it was obvious that my Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics should be about colloquial Hebrew syntax. But there was just one small problem: No one, amazingly, in 1972, had yet even begun to describe it. And so that's how I began my academic career teaching Hebrew linguistics at Haifa University. A Brit teaching them about their own language. And still (and still today) deeply in love with it.

BBC SOUND DOCUMENTARY ON THE REBIRTH OF SPOKEN HEBREW

It's a strange world. In the Israeli media, the centenary of the rebirth of Spoken Hebrew passed unnoticed.

Not so in Britain: In 1989, the BBC invited me to create a 45 minute documentary on the rebirth of Hebrew, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. It has now been placed on the BBC's Archive. You can hear it crystal-clear at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p033k7qn