The late Professor Shlomo Morag was one of the most prominent language researchers. He was one of the pioneers in the study of the traditions of the denominations, and was awarded the Israel Prize when he was only forty years old. Morag dealt with many aspects of Hebrew research. This book is a collection of his essays, and they deal with ancient and modern Hebrew language, Hebrew pronunciation and the form of words from the Middle Ages to the present day, Hebrew and its connections to the languages of the Jews, the connection of Hebrew to Hebrew culture and Hebrew education, and more.

The Hebrew language comes down to us in several versions, each ethnic community having its own unique tradition of pronunciation. Even though these traditions are subject to the various vernaculars and sometimes differ markedly from each other, their common basis is evident. All, that is, but the pronunciation of the Samaritans, whose traditions stands apart from the others, unique and surprising.

Judezmo — the language also known as Ladino, Spanyolit, and Judeo-Spanish — is a Jewish language composed of Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic and Arabic, and Balkan elements, which arose in medieval Spain and evolved after the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, primarily in the Ottoman Empire. The present book is a comprehensive, university-level Hebrew-language introduction to Judezmo, as written in the traditional Rashi alphabet. It includes a structural and sociolinguistic overview of the language and the literature created in it from the Middle Ages through the modern era, a rich anthology of reading selections, linguistic analysis, exercises to reinforce the active acquisition of the language, a detailed chart of the verbal system, and a bilingual dictionary. The reading selections, presented in order of difficulty, were taken from the modern Judezmo literature and press of the past 200 years, and from the rich Judezmo oral literature — including proverbs and sayings, folk songs and ballads, stories, jokes and riddles. The reading selections introduce the reader to the captivating cultural and social world of the Judezmo-speaking Sephardim in the modern era. The linguistic analysis includes a description of the Judezmo sound system, the Hebrew-letter and Roman-letter writing systems used to transcribe it, and a morphological and syntactic analysis of the linguistic structures appearing in the reading selections, designed to provide the reader with a thorough introduction to modern Judezmo in its diverse regional and stylistic forms. The book is meant for individual study as well as group use, and assumes no prior knowledge of any language except Hebrew.