In Memoriam Haiim B. Rose'n

Ron Kuzar kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
Thu Oct 7 11:58:26 UTC 1999


On Saturday, October 2, Professor Haiim B. Rose'n passed away in
Paris, and the funeral took place today in Jerusalem. Rose'n was the
most important expounder of structuralism in Israel. He was a
charismatic teacher, and hundreds of graduates of the Department of
Linguistics at the Hebrew University remember his ongoing three-part
introductory course spanning all the years of the BA, entitled
"Foundations of Language Analysis", covering synchronic linguistics,
diachronic linguistics, and comparative and typological linguistics.
As graduate students we always came back  to this course, to better
understand what we might have missed before. In all his other
teachings we always experience love and intimate knowledge of the
themes and languages discussed.
   Early in the 1950s, Rose'n declared that there was a new language
in Israel, Israeli Hebrew, which has its own e'tat de langue,
deserving synchronic investigation. This language, said Rose'n, was
not an immature mixture of its historical components to be corrected
an shaped by prescriptivists, but rather it showed clear signs of
normal behavior through regular internal language processes. A decade
of linguistic and cultural debates followed this declaration, which
paved the way for all the research conducted on Israeli Hebrew since
then.
   Rose'n was both a structuralist linguist and a philologist, and I
have no doubts that his many contributions to Indo-European
linguistics, Semitics, and to Greek philology, as well as many other
domains, will remain an asset to the linguistic community for many
years to come.



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