There is nothing I can contribute here except to impart the useful information that his name is not pronounced like that of the equally celebrated Wizard, but is rather: AH-moss OHZ.
Anyhow -- what struck me linguistically was his comparison of modern Hebrew to... Elizabethan English.
I had always thought rather slightingly of the Hebrew revival -- several cuts above Esperanto, to be sure,
("Toute langue artificielle, d'inspiration soit mathématique, soit logique, est une langue mort-née. “ -- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 84 -- who, pourtant, actually went to the trouble of learning Esperanto, until he heard that it had been superseded by Ido; at which point he wrote it all off as a bad bargain.)
And yet... once invented... The astonishing practical success of this quixotic project was first brought home to me, many decades ago, when I met some Israelis monolingual in modern Hebrew, speaking very halting English. And such is the Zeitgeist that any language may become a cauldron, brewing and birthing forth -- lo! bright new things ...
[Update] A bonus, courtesy of Martin Gardner -- again a monosyllabic surname, with an unexpectedly long rounded vowel: that of cosmic-inflation-maven Alan Guth, with (delightfully) rhymes with truth. (Unfortunately this chime -- this resonance! -- cannot be adduced as evidence for the validity of his theory, which Penrose now is calling "not just falsifiable, but falsified". -- Oh well. Still. Nice name.)
