Reviews for An Introduction to Language and Linguistics: Breaking the Language Spell

The average rating for An Introduction to Language and Linguistics: Breaking the Language Spell based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-01-17 00:00:00 Jeanne Blagg This is a fantastic book that I wish I had found a year ago. John Huehnergard has a fantastic introduction that is perfect for someone coming from a linguistics background, without the jargon and minutiae of Semitology. David Marcus provides a great introduction to Akkadian. Simon B. Parker highlighted (for me, once again) that we know next to nothing about the other Canaanite languages! John Kaltner gives a good introduction to Arabic, but doesn't show its continuing usefulness to Biblical scholarship. He does, however, find lots of wrong cognate-links in The Hebrew And Aramaic Lexicon Of The Old Testament! Frederick E. Greenspahn's article on Aramaic was so good, I had to add it to my papers on Daniel and Ezra, and cite it five times! Donald B. Redford's article on Egyptian was historically informative, but didn't seem to correspond with Biblical linguistics topics from the Old Testament. I need to go talk to my professor Daniel Kim - who got his Ph.D in Egyptian - because this article made it sound like only Coptic has any philological contributions to make to Biblical Studies. Jo Ann Hackett's write-up on Biblical and Epigraphic Hebrew was excellent. Baruch A. Levine seemed to be defending the study of Post-Biblical Hebrew to non-Jews in a very defensive and non-productive way. Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. wrote about Hittite, but it seemed so far removed from anything to do with Biblical Studies that it just made me want to study Hurrian more! Charles R. Krahmalkov wrote about Phoenician/Punic. It was most informative about historical matters, but still very good. Peggy L. Day's article on Ugaritic seemed overly political and felt very out of place in this volume. Perhaps a Feminist agenda doesn't jive with the tone of all the other articles. Overall, very well done and dense, informative. Recommended for anyone going on from Hebrew to further Semitic studies.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-15 00:00:00 BARRY COURTNEY A really good collection on the various languages surrounding the context of the creation of the Hebrew Bible from a great list of authors. I didn't read the whole thing, only a sample of the articles, but it's certainly a great reference for when you have questions about specifics.