Judah ben David Hayyuj (Arabic: ﺝﻮﻴﺣ ﺩﻭﺍﺩ ﻦﺑﺇ ﺎﻴﺤﻳ ﺎﻳﺮﻛﺯ ﻮﺑﺍ Abu Zakariyya Yahya ibn Dawud) was a Spanish-Jewish grammarian; born in Fez, Morocco, about 950. At an early age he went to Cordoba, where he seems to have remained till his death, which occurred early in the eleventh century. Arabic can mean: From or related to Arabia From or related to the Arabs The Arabic language; see also Arabic grammar The Arabic alphabet, used for expressing the languages of Arabic, Persian, Malay ( Jawi), Kurdish, Panjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Urdu, among others. ... The word Jew ( Hebrew: יהודי) is used in a wide number of ways, but generally refers to a follower of the Jewish faith, a child of a Jewish mother, or someone of Jewish descent with a connection to Jewish culture or ethnicity and often a combination of these attributes. ... Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. ... This article is about the city Fez in Morocco. ... Córdoba most commonly means Córdoba, Spain, a famous city in Spain inhabited since the time of ancient Rome, and the seat of the Emir of Córdoba and the Caliph of Córdoba. ...

Career

Hayyuj was a pupil of Menahem ben Saruq, whom he later helped to defend against the attacks of Dunash ben Labrat and his followers. Later in life Hayyuj developed his own theories about Hebrew grammar, and was himself obliged to step forward as an opponent of the grammatical theories of his teacher. His thorough knowledge of Arabic grammatical literature led him to apply to the Hebrew grammar the theories elaborated by Arabic grammarians, and thus to become the founder of the scientific study of that discipline. The preceding scholars had found the greatest difficulty in accounting, by the laws of Hebrew morphology, for the divergences existing between the regular, or so-called "strong," verbs and the "weak" verbs. A hopeless confusion appeared to reign here in Hebrew; and much ingenuity was spent in endeavoring to discover the principles that controlled the conjugation of the verbs. The weakness of Menahem's assertion that there are stems in Hebrew containing three letters, two letters, and one letter respectively was pointed out by Dunash; but, although the latter was on the road to a solution of the problem, it was left to Ḥayyuj to find the key. Menahem ben Saruq (also known as Menahem ben Jacob ibn Saruq was a Spanish-Jewish philologist of the tenth century CE. He was a skilled poet and polyglot. ... Dunash ben Labrat (920-990) was a medieval Jewish commentator, poet, and grammarian of the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain and a student of Rabbi Saadia Gaon. ... Hebrew (עִבְרִית or עברית, ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Jewish communities around the world. ... Arabic can mean: From or related to Arabia From or related to the Arabs The Arabic language; see also Arabic grammar The Arabic alphabet, used for expressing the languages of Arabic, Persian, Malay ( Jawi), Kurdish, Panjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Urdu, among others. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... A regular verb is a verb whose conjugation can be predicted given a few verb forms (principal parts) and a few rules. ... In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. ... Conjugation may refer to: Grammatical conjugation, the modification of runnign a verb from its basic form Latin conjugation, Spanish conjugation and The English verb, each with complex conjugation forms Marriage, relationship between two individuals In mathematics: Complex conjugation, the operation which multiplies the imaginary part of a complex number by... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ...

His Works

Hayyuj announced that all Hebrew stems consist of three letters, and maintained that when one of those letters was a "vowel letter," such a letter could be regarded as "concealed" in diverse ways in the various verbal forms. To substantiate his theory he wrote the treatise upon which his reputation chiefly rests, the Kitab al-Af'al Dhawat Huruf al-Lin (The Book of Verbs Containing Weak Letters). The treatise is in three parts: the first is devoted to verbs whose first radical is a weak letter; the second to verbs whose second radical is weak; and the third to verbs whose third radical is weak. Within each division he furnishes what he considers a complete list of the verbs belonging to the class in question, enumerates various forms of the verb, and, when necessary, adds brief comments and explanations. Preceding each division the principles underlying the formation of the stems belonging to the division are systematically set forth in a series of introductory chapters. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

As a supplement to this treatise he wrote a second, which he called the Kitab al-Af'al Dhawat al-Mathalain (The Book of Verbs Containing Double Letters), and in which he points out the principles governing the verbs whose second and third radicals are alike. He furnishes a list of these verbs, together with their various forms occurring in the Bible. Besides the two treatises on verbs Hayyuj wrote Kitab al-Tanqit (The Book of Punctuation). This work, probably written before his two chief treatises, is an attempt to set forth the features underlying the Masoretic use of the vowels and of the word-tone. In this work he deals chiefly with nouns, and its purpose is more of a practical than of a theoretical character. The Gutenberg Bible owned by the United States Library of Congress The Bible (Hebrew: תנ״ך tanakh, Greek: η Βίβλος hē biblos, the book) (sometimes The Holy Bible, Scripture, is the name used by Jews and Christians for their differing (and overlapping) canons of sacred texts. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ...

A fourth work, the Kitab al-Natf (The Book of Extracts), is known to have been written by Hayyuj, but only a fragment, unpublished as of the beginning of the 20th century, and a few quotations by later authors have survived. This was a supplement to his two grammatical works on the verb, and in it he noted the verbs omitted by him in the former treatises. In doing this he anticipated in a measure ibn Janah's Mustalhaq which was devoted to this very purpose. He arranged and discussed the verbal stems in question, not alphabetically, but in the order in which they occur in the Bible.

Influence

Hayyuj exerted an immense influence on succeeding generations. All later Hebrew grammarians up to the present day base their works on his; and the technical terms still employed in current Hebrew grammars are most of them simply translations of the Arabic terms employed by Hayyuj. His first three works were twice translated into Hebrew, first by Moses ibn Gikatilla and later by Abraham ibn Ezra. The following modern editions of his works have appeared: Rabbi Abraham Ben Meir Ibn Ezra (also known as Ibn Ezra, or Abenezra) (1092 or 1093-1167), was one of the most distinguished Jewish men of letters and writers of the Middle Ages. ...

• Ewald and Dukes, "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Aeltesten Auslegung und Spracherklärung des Alten Testaments," Stuttgart, 1844. (i. 123, ii. 155; vol. iii. contains Ibn Ezra's translation of Ḥayyuj).

• John W. Nutt, "Two Treatises on Verbs Containing Treble and Double Letters by R. Jehuda Ḥayug of Fez: From a Hebrew Translation of the Original Arabic by R. Moses Giḳaṭilla of Cordova; to Which Is Added the [Arabic text of the] Treatise on Punctuation by the Same Author, Translated by Aben Ezra: Edited from Bodleian MSS. with an English Translation." London and Berlin, 1870.

• M. Jastrow, Jr., "The Weak and Germinative Verbs in Hebrew by . . . Hayyug, the Arabic Text Now Published for the First Time." Leyden, 1897. (Comp. Bacher in "J. Q. R." xi. 504-514.)

Bibliography

• W. Bacher, Die Grammatische Terminologie, des . . . Ḥajjug, Vienna, 1882 (comp. with this N. Porges in Monatsschrift, xxxii. 285-288, 330-336);
• W. Bacher, in Winter and Wünsche, Die Jüdische Literatur, ii. 161-169;
• Israelsohn, in R. E. J. xix. 306;
• J. Derenbourg, ib. xix. 310;
• Harkavy, ib. xxxi. 288;
• N. Porges, in Monatsschrift, xxxiv. 321;
• L. Luzzatto, in Il Vessillo Israelitico, xliv. 385;
• B. Drachman, Die Stellung und Bedeutung des J. Ḥajjug in der Geschichte der Hebräischen Grammatik, Breslau, 1885;
• Morris Jastrow, Jr., Abu Zakarijja Jaḥja b. Dawud Ḥajjug und Seine Zwei Grammatischen Schriften über die Verben mit Schwachen Buchstaben und die Verben mit Doppelbuchstaben, Giessen, 1885.

This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain. The Jewish Encyclopedia was an encyclopedia originally published between 1901 and 1906 by Funk and Wagnalls. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...