Jonah ibn Janah יונה אבן ג'נאח

Born at Cordova about 990. He studied with Rabbi Isaac ibn Gikatilla and Rabbi Isaac ibn Mar Saul, and knew Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. About 1012, when the Berbers besieged Cordova, he left for Zaragoza and lived there to the end—physician and grammarian at once.

His book is the Kitab al-Tanqih, the Book of Detailed Investigation. It is in two parts: the Kitab al-Luma, a complete grammar of Hebrew, and the Kitab al-Usul, a dictionary of more than two thousand roots. It is the first work in which the language is described whole.

He stands on Hayyuj and says so—but corrects him and adds fifty-four roots. Out of this came his quarrel with Samuel ha-Nagid, vizier of Granada, who held that Hayyuj was not to be corrected. They exchanged whole treatises; the dispute was never settled, and scholarship gained a great deal from it.

To him also belongs an observation commentators still use: in the Bible a word may stand in place of another connected with it—and then the plain meaning is not what to look for.

He wrote in Arabic. Judah ibn Tibbon translated him into Hebrew in 1214, and through that translation the book spread through Europe.