Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 12 • July 2004
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From Milon ha-Hoveh
to Milon Sapir The
main innovation of Milon ha-Hoveh was in presenting the verbs in the
present participle form, as opposed to other dictionaries that inscribe the
verbs according to their past form. It can be assumed that, with the name Dictionary
of the Present, the editors wanted to point to this quality of their
dictionary and perhaps also to hint it is up to date in accord with the
publication date. Six
years later a new dictionary appeared, Milon Sapir, whose chief editor
was the publisher Eitan Avnion, and the scientific editorial team included
Professor Raphael Nir, Shoshana Bahat (who edited MH with Mordechai Mishor)
and Dr Yitzhak Shlesinger. This dictionary had a similar pattern to its
predecessor, namely, edited in ha-Hoveh method for the lexicographic
entries of the verbs. On
the one hand, there are a number of similarities in these two dictionaries,
but on the other hand there are a number of differences. The
most prominent innovation in the dictionary of Bahat and Mishor is, then,
editing the verbs according to the present tense form. The editors gave in
the preface several reasons for this method, some pragmatic – for ease of
use, and some editorial – considerations stemming from the ambiguity of the
Hebrew present tense form, which often appears both as a verb and as a noun
or an adjective. The editors adopted this editing method in MS. The
contribution of this dictionary to those involved with Hebrew language
research and to anyone interested in using a dictionary from time to time is
primarily its scope: MH has 21,000 entries whereas MS contains over 100,000
main and sub-entries (the MH editors were sparing with sub-entries while the
editors of MS treated sub-entries at length). However,
the increase in the number of entries
in MS stems also from a grammatical-linguistic decision concerning the
division into grammatical categories. Thus, for example, two entries for mukpa
(frozen): first, the verb, including tense inflections (hukpa,
yukpa / was/will be frozen), then the adjective, including the gender and
number inflections (mukpa, mukpet, mukpaim, mukpaot / is/are frozen).
This division of the present tense form into two entries according to their
grammatical category reflects the grammatical system of modern Hebrew, which
is indeed the main aim of MS.
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