About

Prof. Aharon GEVA KLEINBERGER

Aharon GEVA KLEINBERGER is the Head of the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Haifa and a member in its Senate. He studied his doctoral studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg under the supervision of the world renowned Prof. Otto Jastrow (Semitic Philology) additionally to Islam Studies and Assyriology. Prof. GEVA KLEINBERGER is a dialectologist, an expert of dialects in the Arab World especially in the field of Palestinian dialects and a researcher of Modern Semitic Languages. His work is not merely of linguistic interest, since the texts that he collects can serve historians and anthropologists from an etymological point of view. He wrote several books: on the Arabic dialect of Haifa in the beginning of the twentieth century (in German), another- on the Arabic dialect of the Jews of Tiberias (in English) and a third one in Hebrew on the work of the orientalist Graf Dr. E. von Muelinen. Prof. GEVA KLEINBERGER has been concentrating in the recent years on researching Judaeo-Arabic dialects: Jewish dialects in Galilee (Safed and Peqi'in) and Jewish dialects in the Far East: India, Burma and Singapore. He has also conducted a work on the Arabic dialects of the Jews of Sudan, Yemen and Lebanon. His researches focus on Arabic dialects that are in severe danger of extinction. He worked in two large projects on Palestinian dialects in Northern Israel, financed first by the GIF (German-Israeli Foundation) and then by the ISF (Israel Science Foundation). In these two projects also other prominent Israeli and German scholars were involved. He is working these days together with Dr. Peter Behnstedt on a current atlas of the Arabic dialects of Northern Israel. Prof. GEVA KLEINBERGER has studies several languages: English, Arabic, German, French, Italian, Maltese, Amharic, Ge'ez, Turkish, Persian, Western Aramaic, Mehri, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Marathi and Russian. His L1, L2: Hebrew and Yiddish.