The Nominal Sentence in Rabbi Judah Ibn-Tibbon’s translation of Duties of the Hearts

Abstract

Many scholars have focused on the nominal sentence in Hebrew, examining its various manifestations across different periods. These scholars have investigated word order, the place and function of the separate personal pronoun, the conjugation of the verb “to be” (היה), the various types of third members in extended models, nominal sentence models (including modal and existential sentences, in the context of a broader definition of the nominal sentence where the predicate is not a verb), the development of the nominal sentence through the different strata of the Hebrew language, etc.

This article will present the nominal sentence as it is reflected in Rabbi Judah Ibn-Tibbon’s translation of Rabbi Bahya Ibn-Paquda’s Duties of the Hearts. The analysis will be approached from three perspectives: (a) a diachronic study—comparing patterns of the nominal sentence in the Bible and in the Mishnah to those found in Duties of the Hearts; (b) an examination of Arabized Hebrew in medieval texts, comparing the nominal sentence structures in the research literature with those in Duties of the Hearts; and (c) a comparative study—contrasting occurrences of the nominal sentence in Ibn-Tibbon’s translation with their counterparts in the original Arabic text. This research marks the first stage in a broader effort to provide a new comprehensive syntactic description of Arabized Hebrew.