The curious case(s) of the Hebrew article: on a conflated grammatical category and how it emerges from sixteenth-century student notes

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Hebrew appeared at the linguistic horizon of western humanists at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the first Hebraists tried with difficulty to render its grammatical knowledge into Latin and Latinate terminology. One such issue was created by the Hebrew definite article. Greek grammar disposed of a separate part of speech for this feature, viz. ἄρθρον (árthron), which was translated into Latin as articulus – even when Latin lacked the definite article. In Hebraist grammars, the article is often treated together with prepositions to represent a Hebrew case system in which ‘articles’ would indicate the case instead of a morphological ending. In this contribution, I aim to shed light on how sixteenth-century Hebraists based in Louvain dealt with this challenging problem, since many Hebraists were educated at the city’s Collegium Trilingue (‘College of the Three Tongues’, founded in 1517). In addition, evidence of lessons given at the Trilingue (specifically course notes) offers additional information on how Hebrew grammar, including the article, was taught in this period. These sources have thus far been neglected by research in the history of linguistics and they offer an alternative perspective on the treatment of challenging grammatical concepts.