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The Kitsur shulḥan ‘arukh, Hasidic Tale, and Maskilic Literature as Exemplars of Ashkenazic Hebrew

ABSTRACT:This article examines the language of three distinct prominent Eastern European Hebrew textual corpora, namely the Kitsur shul@han ‘arukh, the Hasidic hagiographic tale, and Maskilic fiction. It demonstrates that despite their authors’ divergent ideological and religio- cultural stances, each of the three corpora exhibits striking similarities in their use of particular morphosyntactic features which are regarded as non-standard vis-à-vis earlier canonical forms of the language. These features include the use of prepositions in conjunction with the definite article; non-standard noun gender; definite construct nouns; doubly definite construct chains; avoidance of the dual in conjunction with time words and numerals; and feminine numerals modifying masculine nouns. These similarities suggest that the the Kitsur shul@han ‘arukh, Hasidic tale, and Maskilic fiction are all constituents of a more widespread Ashkenazic form of the language with shared grammatical characteristics which have not yet been systematically documented. By highlighting these shared features and placing them within their broader linguistic context, the article seeks to contribute to a clearer understanding of Ashkenazic Hebrew and redress the scholarly inattention to this important form of the language.