Dr. Baruch Podolsky
1940-2011

Baruch – linguist, lexicographer, and Prisoner of Zion – was born Boris Semyonovich Podolsky (Борис Семёнович Подольский) in Moscow in 1940.

Already as a child he had learned Yiddish and Hebrew, in addition to Russian, from his parents. At 16, he began studying Hindi at Moscow State University. His studies ended abruptly two years later, when he was sentenced to five years in a forced labor camp for his Zionist activities. After his release he studied English at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, but he was imprisoned in a forced labor camp for an additional two years for his continued Zionist activities. In 1971, the Soviet authorities finally permitted him to immigrate to Israel.

In Israel he studied for a B.A. in General Linguistics and Semitic Linguistics (1974) and a M.A. in Semitic Linguistics (1976) at Tel Aviv University. His teaching career had already begun in 1973, teaching in the University's Department of Linguistics. In 1985 he received a Ph.D. for his research of the historical phonetics and phonology of Amharic.

Baruch's research spanned numerous fields: comparative linguistics, etymology, lexicography, history of writing, Nostratic linguistics, Semitic phonology and morphophonemics, Modern Hebrew, and Indian, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan and American Indian languages. He edited dozens of books, and was a member of the editorial board of Israel Oriental Studies.

Baruch's work was not limited to academic research. He published a practical grammar of the Hebrew language in Russian (1985), an Amharic-Hebrew dictionary (1985), and a Hebrew-Russian and Russian-Hebrew dictionary (1992). In the 1990s he began lecturing about the Hebrew language on Israeli Radio International (Radio Reka), in Russian.

Baruch taught many courses in Semitic linguistics at Tel Aviv University, at the University of Michigan, and at Moscow State University. He continued teaching throughout his lifetime.

He died of cancer in 2011.

Education

Major Publications

Books

• A Practical Grammar of Hebrew. Tel Aviv 1985. [Russian]
• A Small Hebrew-Amharic Vocabulary. Jerusalem 1985.
• A Greek Tatar-English Glossary. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1985.
• Historical Phonetics of Amharic. Tel Aviv 1991.
• Hebrew-Russian Dictionary. Tel Aviv: Rolnik & Moscow: Russki Yazyk, 1992.
• Russian-Hebrew Dictionary. Tel Aviv: Rolnik & Moscow: Russki Yazyk, 1992.

Papers

• "Morphophonology of Amharic verb." In: Modern Ethiopia/L'Ethiopie moderne. Rotterdam: Balkema, 1980.
• "Stress as a morphological factor in Modern Hebrew." Leshonenu 45, 1981. [Hebrew]
• "Some problems in phonology and morphophonology of Amharic." In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. Addis Ababa - Uppsala - East Lansing 1984.
• "Notes on the Urum (Greek Tatar) language." Rocznik Orientalistyczny (Warsaw) 44/2, 1985.
• "Notes on the Urum language" [revised version]. Mediterranean Language Review 2, 1985.
• "The system of verbal stems in Amharic." Ethiopian Studies, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. Rotterdam/Boston: Balkema, 1986.
• "The schwa vowel in Amharic". Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau, vol. 2. Wiesbaden 1991.
• "The problem of word accent in Modern Hebrew". In: H.G. Mukarovsky (ed.), Proceedings of the 5th International Hamito-Semitic Congress, vol. 2. Wien 1991.
• "Mass immigration and its possible impact on the linguistic situation in Israel". Israel Oriental Studies 15. 1995.
• "Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords in Russian." Massorot 9-11, Jerusalem 1997. [Hebrew]
• I. Mel'chuk and B. Podolsky. "Stress in Modern Hebrew nominal inflection." Theoretical Linguistics 22, 1/2, 1996"

Edited some 30 books, translated into Russian and Hebrew.