Modern Hebrew

Modern Hebrew (endonym: עִבְרִית חֲדָשָׁה, romanized: 'Ivrit ḥadasha,

IPA: [ivˈʁit χadaˈʃa] or [ʕivˈrit ħadaˈʃa]), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today, and the native tongue of the Jewish people. It is the only surviving Canaanite language, as well as one of the oldest languages still spoken, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. The current standard was codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the sole official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is predominantly spoken by over 9 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is near universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history.

A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew was spoken since antiquity as the vernacular of the Jews until around the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted by a western dialect of the Aramaic language, the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence, it became extinct as a spoken language.

By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as an everyday language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and a distinct Jewish nationality in the context of Zionism. Soon after, a large number of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers were murdered in the Holocaust or fled to Israel, and many speakers of Judeo-Arabic emigrated to Israel in the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, where many would adapt to Modern Hebrew.

Currently, Hebrew is spoken by approximately 9–10 million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers. Some 6 million of these speak it as their native language, the overwhelming majority of whom are Jews who were born in Israel or immigrated during early childhood. The rest is split: 2 million are immigrants to Israel; 1.5 million are Israeli Arabs, whose first language is usually Arabic; and half a million are expatriate Israelis or diaspora Jews.

Under Israeli law, the organization that officially directs the development of Modern Hebrew is the Academy of the Hebrew Language, headquartered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Name

The most common scholarly term for the language is "Modern Hebrew" (עברית חדשה). Most people refer to it simply as "Hebrew" (עבריתHebrew pronunciation: [ivˈʁit]).

The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic" as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew. Haiim B. Rosén [he] (חיים רוזן) supported the now widely used term "Israeli Hebrew" on the basis that it "represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew". In 1999, Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed the term "Israeli" to represent the multiple origins of the language.

Background

The history of the Hebrew language can be divided into four major periods:

Biblical Hebrew, until about the 3rd century BCE; the language of most of the Hebrew Bible
Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah and Talmud
Medieval Hebrew, from about the 6th to the 13th century CE
Modern Hebrew, from the late 19th century to now, the language of the modern State of Israel

Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region.

Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile, Hebrew became restricted to liturgical and literary use.

Revival

Hebrew had been spoken at various times and for many purposes throughout the Diaspora. During the Old Yishuv, it had developed into a spoken lingua franca among Palestinian Jews. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda then led a revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling and grammar, and Sephardic pronunciation. Many idioms and calques were made from Yiddish. Its acceptance by the early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was caused primarily by support from the organisations of Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and the official status it received in the 1922 constitution of the British Mandate for Palestine. Ben-Yehuda codified and planned Modern Hebrew using 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries. Many new words were borrowed from Arabic, due to the language's common Semitic roots with Hebrew, but changed to fit Hebrew phonology and grammar, for example the words gerev (sing.) and garbayim (pl.) are now applied to 'socks', a diminutive of the Arabic ğuwārib ('socks'). In addition, early Jewish immigrants, borrowing from the local Arabs, and later immigrants from Arab lands introduced many nouns as loanwords from Arabic (such as nana, zaatar, mishmish, kusbara, ḥilba, lubiya, hummus, gezer, rayḥan, etc.), as well as much of Modern Hebrew's slang. Despite Ben-Yehuda's fame as the renewer of Hebrew, the most productive renewer of Hebrew words was poet Haim Nahman Bialik.

One of the phenomena seen with the revival of the Hebrew language is that old meanings of nouns were occasionally changed for altogether different meanings, such as bardelas (ברדלס, a loanword from Koinē Greek: πάρδαλις, romanized: párdalis, lit. 'leopard, panther'), which in Mishnaic Hebrew meant 'hyena', but in Modern Hebrew it now means 'cheetah'; or shezīf (שזיף) which is now used for 'plum', but formerly meant 'jujube'. The word kishū’īm (formerly 'cucumbers') is now applied to a variety of summer squash (Cucurbita pepo var. cylindrica), a plant native to the New World. Another example is the word kǝvīsh (כביש), which now denotes a street or a road, but is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning 'trodden down' or 'blazed', rather than a common noun. It was originally used to describe a blazed trail. The flower Anemone coronaria, called in Modern Hebrew kalanit (כלנית), was formerly called in Hebrew shoshanat ha-melekh ('the king's flower').

Classification

Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family, within the Canaanite branch of the Northwest Semitic subgroup. While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah eras and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax,^{[page needed]} some scholars posit that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state, though this is not the consensus among scholars.

Modern Hebrew is considered to be a koiné language based on historical layers of Hebrew that incorporates foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution. A minority of scholars argue that the revived language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European. These theories are controversial and have not been met with general acceptance, and the consensus among a majority of scholars is that Modern Hebrew, despite its non-Semitic influences, can correctly be classified as a Semitic language. Although Modern Hebrew has more of the features attributed to Standard Average European than Biblical Hebrew, it is still quite distant, and has fewer such features than Modern Standard Arabic.

Alphabet

Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet, which is an abjad, or consonant-only script of 22 letters based on the "square" letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which was developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive script is used in handwriting. When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letters known as Nikkud, or by use of Matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels. Further diacritics like Dagesh and Sin and Shin dots are used to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the consonants (e.g. bet/vet, shin/sin). The letters "

צ׳‎", "ג׳‎", "ז׳‎", each modified with a Geresh, represent the consonants [t͡ʃ], [d͡ʒ], [ʒ]. The consonant [t͡ʃ] may also be written as "תש‎" and "טש‎". [w] is represented interchangeably by a simple vav "ו‎", non-standard double vav "וו‎" and sometimes by non-standard geresh modified vav "ו׳‎".

Phonology

Modern Hebrew has fewer phonemes than Biblical Hebrew but it has developed its own phonological complexity. Israeli Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants, depending on whether the speaker has pharyngeals. It has 5 to 10 vowels, depending on whether diphthongs and vowels are counted, varying with the speaker and the analysis.

Morphology

Modern Hebrew morphology (formation, structure, and interrelationship of words in a language) is essentially Biblical. Modern Hebrew showcases much of the inflectional morphology of the classical upon which it was based. In the formation of new words, all verbs and the majority of nouns and adjectives are formed by the classically Semitic devices of triconsonantal roots (shoresh) with affixed patterns (mishkal). Mishnaic attributive patterns are often used to create nouns, and Classical patterns are often used to create adjectives. Blended words are created by merging two bound stems or parts of words.

Syntax

The syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic but also shows the influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed during the revival period and over the past century.

Word order

The word order of Modern Hebrew is predominately SVO (subject–verb–object). Biblical Hebrew was originally VSO (verb–subject–object), but drifted into SVO. In the modern language, a sentence may correctly be arranged in any order but its meaning might be hard to understand unless אֶת is used.^{[clarification needed]} Modern Hebrew maintains classical syntactic properties associated with VSO languages: it is prepositional, rather than postpositional, in marking case and adverbial relations, auxiliary verbs precede main verbs; main verbs precede their complements, and noun modifiers (adjectives, determiners other than the definite article ה- (ha), and noun adjuncts) follow the head noun; and in genitive constructions, the possessee noun precedes the possessor. Moreover, Modern Hebrew allows and sometimes requires sentences with a predicate initial.

Sample text

Lexicon

Modern Hebrew has expanded its vocabulary effectively to meet the needs of casual vernacular, of science and technology, of journalism and belles-lettres. According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann:

Loanwords

Modern Hebrew has loanwords from Arabic (both from the local Palestinian dialect and from the dialects of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries), Aramaic, Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, English and other languages. Simultaneously, Israeli Hebrew makes use of words that were originally loanwords from the languages of surrounding nations from ancient times: Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian. Mishnaic Hebrew borrowed many nouns from Aramaic (including Persian words borrowed by Aramaic), as well as from Greek and to a lesser extent Latin. In the Middle Ages, Hebrew made heavy semantic borrowing from Arabic, especially in the fields of science and philosophy. Here are typical examples of Hebrew loanwords:

References

Bibliography

Choueka, Yaakov (1997). Rav-Milim: A comprehensive dictionary of Modern Hebrew. Tel Aviv: CET. ISBN 978-965-448-323-0.
Ben-Ḥayyim, Ze'ev (1992). The Struggle for a Language. Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language.
Dekel, Nurit (2014). Colloquial Israeli Hebrew: A Corpus-based Survey. De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-037725-5.
Gila Freedman Cohen; Carmia Shoval (2011). Easing Into Modern Hebrew Grammar: A User-friendly Reference and Exercise Book. Magnes Press. ISBN 978-965-493-601-9.
Shlomo Izreʾel; Shlomo Raz (1996). Studies in Modern Semitic Languages. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-10646-8.
Matras, Yaron; Schiff, Leora (2005). "Spoken Israeli Hebrew revisited: Structures and variation" (PDF). Studia Semitica. 16: 145–193.
Ornan, Uzzi (2003). "The Final Word: Mechanism for Hebrew Word Generation". Hebrew Studies. 45. Haifa University: 285–287. JSTOR 27913706.
Bergsträsser, Gotthelf (1983). Peter T. Daniels (ed.). Introduction to the Semitic Languages: Text Specimens and Grammatical Sketches. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-0-931464-10-2.
Haiim B. Rosén [in Hebrew] (1962). A Textbook of Israeli Hebrew. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-72603-8. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Stefan Weninger (23 December 2011). The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.
Wexler, Paul (1990). The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 978-3-447-03063-2.
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1403917232.

External links