Bilingualism in the Hebrew Text

Abstract

This article is an attempt to discuss bilingualism in the Hebrew text from a variety of viewpoints, both historical and practical. The unique characteristics of Hebrew, its language and writing system are discussed in relation to a long historical tradition of bilingual texts, such as the Aramaic translations of the early christian era, 16th century Polyglot bibles and Passover Haggadahs. Present-day strategies, both from the outlook of typesetting and translation, are explored and the "invisible" effects of Hebrew lexical and syntactic pattern on English speakers are analyzed. The author puts forward the idea that there is a kind of blocking or switching mechanism at work which allows the monolingual Hebrew reader to block out the foreign element embedded within the Hebrew text.