Mony Almalech
Mony Almalech is a full–time professor at the New Bulgarian University and a guest professor at the Institute for the Bulgarian Language with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and at the Higher Evangelical Theological Institute (2004–2009). His Ph.D. Dissertation (1990) is on Bulgarian Grammar and his Dr. Habil. Dissertation (2006) is on the Semiotics of Color in the Pentateuch. The scientific interests of Almalech are in the fields of the Bulgarian language, Hebraic studies, Linguistics (general and applied), and Semiotics. His scholarly development was influenced by a two–year specialization with Professor Dimitri Segal (1993–94) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem-Israel. Almalech created the first Hebrew-Bulgarian Dictionary (2004; Second ed. 2011).
His knowledge of Hebrew has allowed him to analyze the original text of the Bible in comparison with various translations, applying the tools of linguistics, semiotics, linguistic anthropology, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics. The first volume of his Biblical Hermeneutic project, Color in the Torah, was published in 2006, the second volume, The Light in The Old Testament, in 2010, and the third one, Red Codes in Old Testament, in 2014.
The interdisciplinary linguo-semiotic and cultural analysis of color is a distinctive feature of his works on color in folklore, literature, Bible, and advertising: Balkan Folk Color Language (1997); Color and Word: Psycholinguistic and Pragmatic Aspects (2001); Roots: Semiotics of Color (2006); The Language of Color (2007; second ed. 2012). The Semiotic Researches of Brands: Semiotics of Color in the Advertisement (2011).
Almalech’s first monograph, Semantics and Syntax, back in 1993 was on Bulgarian grammar, and he has never abandoned the subject: Language and Idiolect: The Language of Bulgarian Jews in Israel (2006). Authorship and compilership of the Manual in General Linguistics to students philologists from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (2000).
His monographs The Biblical Donkey (2011) and Archeangels in the Bible (2013) are an attractive contribution to his color and hermeneutic surveys.
The English versions of some of Almalech’s books are Balkan Folk Color Language (1996), Advertisements: Signs of femininity and their corresponding color meanings (2011) and Biblical Donkey (2012).
Mony Almalech is a founder of Secular scholarly research on Bible in Bulgaria and active developer of Bulgarian Hebrew Studies. He is a pioneer in Semiotics of Bible and Semiotics of Color. His approach to Bulgarian grammar is an amalgam of traditional and modern methods.