Q&A: Spelling and grammar mistakes among the great Torah sages?
Spelling and grammar mistakes among the great Torah sages?
Question
Hello Rabbi. I’m not sure whether this is correct, but it really feels to me that the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim) write in a terribly distorted and unreadable way. They don’t have orderly, continuous writing structures, so that even the greatest scholar would need a respectable amount of time just to figure out the author’s intent because of how much distortion there is. I also think this is why, among rabbis (the Lithuanians at least), the speech is very unclear and abbreviated and full of needless complications… because in their righteousness they study Torah all day with the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim), which damages their language. You won’t find the rules of the definite article and proper syntax in abundance.
It’s important to note that I’m not hinting that I’m perfect… quite the opposite. It just bothers me that the greatest sages have relatively poor Hebrew compared to modern Hebrew. Will you tell me it’s simply because I’m used to modern Hebrew? I’m not convinced, because of the lack of continuous structures and so on, as I wrote above.
Thank you, and happy holiday to you!
Answer
That is partly true. First, because for them this was not a spoken language, whereas for us it is. Second, sometimes our language rules are newer, and in their time there were different rules. And third, because many of them did not invest energy in this, since it was not important to them.