While others have told the history of the language reform as well, it is Lewis’ great merit that more than a third of his study is devoted to analyzing the ‘ingredients’ and ‘concoctions’ of this reform as he calls them. This he does both expertly and wittily, enlivening his scholarly discussion of how intellectuals and others employed various suffixes to coin new words while frequently bending the rules of linguistics.

Jacob M. Landau, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem