Moses Kimhi's
Mahalak Shebile Ha-daat

Moses Kimhi named his Hebrew grammar Mahalak Shebile Ha-daat from the first few words of the text, which words were chosen because they are an acrostic which spell out in Hebrew the name: M O S E S  K I M H I. The meaning of the introduction is: A Path of the Ways of Knowledge. 40

This is a relatively short, abbreviated grammar, especially when compared with David Kimhi's Sefer Miklol. It is a grammar, without a lexicon, which attempts to present the fundamental rules of the Hebrew language, without dealing with many of the exceptions to the rules.

After an introductory poem the grammar begins with these words, all in Hebrew:

"A path of the ways of knowledge, relationship of the metaphoric speech of wisdom, and advantage to understand the ways of the Holy Language, that there are three: noun, particle and verb.

the noun is divided into four division: the substantive, the attribute, the numeral and the adjective. 41

The next chapters deal with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the accents and the vowels. The rest of the grammar concerns itself with the verbs, their conjugation, and how the conjugation is affected for verbs with "weak" letters in first, second or third root letters.

The edition of this grammar printed by Thomas Anshelm in Hagenau, 1519, contains 79 pages of large Hebrew type. The Hebrew font is extremely easy to read.

When compared with David Kimhi's Sefer Miklol, this grammar can be characterized as a Hebrew primer, in that it is quite short and its contents are restricted to the fundamental rule of word formation.

Sebastian Münster made extensive translations from this grammar in the 1520's. I know of no word for word translation of Mahalak Shebile Ha-daat into a modern language.