Modern Hebrew

"Ivrit" redirects here. For other uses, see Hebrew language.
Modern Hebrew
Israeli Hebrew
עִבְרִית ʿIvrit
Native to Israel
Native speakers
5.3 million as L1 (not all native)  (1998)[1]
as L1 or L2 by all 7.4 million Israelis[1][2]
revitalised Mishnaic Hebrew or relexified Yiddish
Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew Braille
Signed Hebrew (oral Hebrew accompanied by sign)[3]
Official status
Official language in
 Israel
Regulated by Academy of the Hebrew Language
האקדמיה ללשון העברית (HaAkademia LaLashon HaʿIvrit)
Language codes
ISO 639-3 heb
Glottolog hebr1245[4]

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The Hebrew-speaking world:
  regions where Hebrew is the language of the majority
  regions where Hebrew is the language of a significant minority

Modern Hebrew (Hebrew: עברית חדשה, Зivrït Xadašä[h] - "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), also known as Israeli Hebrew[5] (Hebrew: עברית ישראלית Зivrït 'isra͡elït - "Israeli Hebrew") or occasionally Ivrit, is one of the two official languages of Israel (along with Arabic).

The revival of the Hebrew language was led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Its acceptance by the early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was primarily due to 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[6][7][8]

Modern Hebrew is spoken by about nine million people[9][10]—most of them citizens of Israel, of which three million are native speakers of Modern Israeli Hebrew, two million are new immigrants, one million are Israeli Arabs and half a million are Israelis or diaspora Jews who continue to live abroad. Palestinian people are also able to understand and speak the language to some degree.

Modern Hebrew is, together with Modern Standard Arabic, an official language of the modern state of Israel, and before the state's establishment it was one of the official languages of the British Mandate for Palestine.

The organisation that officially directs the development of the Modern Hebrew language, under the law of the State of Israel, is the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Influences

At present Modern Hebrew has been the native language in many families for three generations. The main generational differences are in vocabulary and accent, as is true in many other present-day spoken languages.

Modern Hebrew has been developing in a multi-lingual environment. Half of Modern Israeli Hebrew speakers are not native speakers; furthermore, native speakers of Modern Hebrew usually learn at least one foreign language . In this situation, Modern Hebrew is affected intensively by many foreign languages—through the years Modern Israeli Hebrew has borrowed many words from Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic (mainly spoken Judeo-Arabic and various Levantine Arabic dialects), Latin, Greek, Polish, Russian, English and other languages.

According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in the 1880s (the time of the beginning of the Zionist movement and the Hebrew revival) there were mainly three groups of Hebrew regional accents: Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Sephardi (Spanish/Portuguese/Italian), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern – largely used by Jews of Iraqi, Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Yemeni heritage). Over time features of these systems of pronunciation merged, and nowadays we find two main pronunciations of colloquial not liturgical Hebrew: Oriental and Non-Oriental.[11]

Classification

Modern Hebrew is commonly seen as a direct continuation of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew,[12] though it is recognised that it has a structural Slavic component and has also acquired some European and colloquial Arabic vocabulary and syntactical features, in much the same way as Modern Standard Arabic[13] (or even more so, dialects such as Moroccan Arabic). Some relevant scholarly views are as follows:

Phonology

Consonants

The Hebrew word for consonants is ‘itsurim (עיצורים). The following table lists the Hebrew consonants and their pronunciation in IPA transcription:

Bilabial Labio-
dental
Alveolar Palato-
alveolar
Palatal Velar/
Uvular
Pharyngeal Glottal
Nasal m n
Stop pb td kɡ ʔ
Affricate tsdz
Fricative fv sz ʃʒ χʁ (ħ)(ʕ) h[ɦ]
Approximant l j w

Historical sound changes

Standard (non-Oriental) Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has undergone a number of splits and mergers in its development from Biblical Hebrew (BH).[26]

Yiddish influence

Though an Ashkenazi Jew in Czarist Russia, the Zionist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, based his Standard Hebrew on the Sephardic dialect originally spoken in Spain and therefore recommended an alveolar [r], the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were northern Ashkenazi, and Standard Hebrew would come to be spoken with their preferred uvular articulation as found in Yiddish or modern standard German. Nearly all Jews of the State of Israel today speak Hebrew with a uvular R because of its modern prestige and historical elite status.

Oriental Hebrew

Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin, and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar trill, identical to Arabic ر rāʾ. Under pressure to assimilate, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative, often identical to Arabic غ ġayn. However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music, as well as in the standard (or "standardised") Hebrew used in the Israeli media, an alveolar rhotic is sometimes used. Oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill [r] rather than the uvular trill [ʀ], preserve the pharyngeal consonants /ħ/ and (less commonly) /ʕ/ rather than merging them with /χ ʔ/, preserve gemination, and pronounce /e/ in some places where non-Oriental speakers have null (the so-called shva na).

Dagesh

Hebrew also has dagesh, a phonological process of consonant strengthening that is indicated in pointed texts by a dot placed in the center of a consonant. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (kal, known also as dagesh lene) and heavy (hazak or dagesh forte). The light version applies to the phonemes /b/ /k/ /p/ (historically, also /ɡ/, /d/ and /t/), causing them to be pronounced as stops rather than fricatives, and operates when the dagesh occurs in the beginning of a word or after a consonant (i.e. a silent shva). The heavy dagesh occurs after vowels and applies to all consonants except gutturals and /r/, originally causing them to be pronounced as geminate (doubled) consonants; it also selects the stop allophone of /b/, /k/, /p/, etc. (In Modern Hebrew, gemination has disappeared, and hence the heavy dagesh has a phonological effect only on /b/ /k/ /p/, affecting them the same as the light dagesh.) Traditional Hebrew grammar distinguishes two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh according to their historical origin: structural heavy (hazak tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazak mashlim). Structural heavy dagesh corresponds to consonant doubling that was inherited from Proto-Semitic, and occurs in certain verb conjugations and noun patterns (mishkalim and binyanim; see Modern Hebrew grammar). Complementing heavy dagesh corresponds to consonant doubling that arose within Hebrew as a result of consonant assimilation, most commonly of an /n/ to a following consonant (e.g. Biblical Hebrew /ʔatˈtaː/ "you (m. sg.)" vs. Classical Arabic /ˈʔanta/).

The pairs /b/~/v/, /k/~/χ/, and /p/~/f/ were historically allophonic, as a consequence of the phenomenon of spirantisation known as begadkefat. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are sometimes phonemic.

This phonemic divergence might be due to a number of factors: mergers involving formerly distinct sounds (historical pronunciation /w/ of vav merging with fricative bet, becoming /v/, historical pronunciation /q/ of kuf merging with plosive kaf, becoming /k/, and historical pronunciation /ħ/ of het merging with fricative kaf, becoming /x/), loss of consonant gemination, which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic, and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ and non-syllable-initial /p/ and /b/ (see Begadkefat).

Varieties of ayin

The letter Ayin (ע) historically represented a voiced pharyngeal approximant. Most modern Ashkenazi Jews do not differentiate between א and ע; however, many Mizrahi Jews distinguish these phonemes, as well as Jews from any background wishing to speak Hebrew in its pure (Masoretic Tiberian) form. Georgian Jews pronounce it as []. Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it [ŋ] (like ng in sing)  a pronunciation that can also be found in the Italian tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany. (The remnants of this pronunciation are found throughout the Ashkenazi world, in the name "Yankl" and "Yanki", diminutive forms of Jacob, Heb. יעקב).

Changes in pronunciation of Resh

In Hebrew, the classical pronunciation associated with the consonant ר rêš was flapped [ɾ], and was grammatically treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a flap or a trill [r]. However, in some Ashkenazi dialects as preserved among Jews in northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill [ʀ] or a fricative [ʁ]. This was because most native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and their liturgical Hebrew carried the same pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce rêš as a guttural [ʀ], reflecting their dialect of Arabic.

An apparently unrelated uvular rhotic is believed to have appeared in the Tiberian vocalisation of Hebrew, where it is believed to have coexisted with additional non-guttural articulations of /r/ depending on circumstances.

Vowels

Main article: Niqqud
The vowel phonemes of Modern Israeli Hebrew

The Hebrew word for vowels is tnu'ot (תְּנוּעוֹת). The orthographic representations for these vowels are called Niqqud. Israeli Hebrew has 5 vowel phonemes, represented by the following Niqqud-signs:

phoneme pronunciation in
Modern Hebrew
approximate pronunciation
in English
orthographic representation
"long" *"short" *"very short" / "interrupted" *
/a/[ä](as in "spa") kamats gadol ( ָ ) patach ( ַ ) chataf patach ( ֵ )
/e/ [] (as in "bed") tsere male ( ֵי ) or tsere chaser ( ֵ ) segol ( ֶ ) chataf segol ( ֱ ), sometimes shva ( ְ )
/i/ [i] (as in "ski") chirik male ( ִי ) chirik chaser ( ִ )  
/o/ [] (as in "more")cholam male ( וֹ ) or cholam chaser ( ֹ ) kamatz katan ( ָ ) chataf kamatz ( ֳ )
/u/ [u] (as in "flu" but with no diphthongisation) shuruk (וּ) kubuts ( ֻ )  
* The severalfold orthographic representation of each phoneme attests to the broader phonemic range of vowels in earlier forms of Hebrew. Some linguists still regard the Hebrew grammatical entity of Shva na—marked as Shva (ְ)—as representing a sixth phoneme, /ə/. However, the phonetic realisation of any Shva in modern Hebrew is never a Schwa (the mid central vowel denoted as [ə]) or any vowel otherwise phonetically distinguishable from the other phonemes, but is rather always either identical to those of the phoneme /e/ or is mute, therefore there is no consensus in this matter.

In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (chataf). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew, except that tsere is often pronounced [eɪ] as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.

Shva

Main article: shva

The Niqqud sign "Shva" represents four grammatical entities: resting (nach / נָח), moving (na' / נָע), floating (merahef / מְרַחֵף) and "bleating" or "bellowing" (ga'ya / גַּעְיָּה). In earlier forms of Hebrew, these entities were phonologically and phonetically distinguishable. However, in Modern Hebrew these distinctions are not observed. For example, the (first) Shva Nach in the word קִמַּטְתְ (fem. you crumpled) is pronounced [] ([kiˈmäte̞t]) even though it should be mute, whereas the Shva Na in זְמַן (time), which theoretically should be pronounced, is usually mute ([zmän]). Sometimes the shva is pronounced like a tsere when accented, as in the prefix "ve" meaning "and".

Stress

Hebrew has two frequent kinds of lexical stress, on the last syllable (milrá; מלרע) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, mil‘él; מלעיל), of which the first is more frequent. Contrary to the prescribed standard, some words exhibit a stress on the antepenultimate syllable or even further back. This occurs often in loanwords, e.g. פּוֹלִיטִיקָה /poˈlitika/, "politics", and sometimes in native colloquial compounds, e.g. אֵיכְשֶׁהוּ /ˈeχʃehu/,[27] "somehow"; אֵיפֹשֶׁהוּ /ˈefoʃehu/, "somewhere". Colloquial stress is also often shifted from the last syllable to the penultimate, contrary to the prescribed standard, e.g. כּוֹבַע, normative stress /koˈvaʕ/, colloquial stress /ˈkovaʕ/ "hat"; שׁוֹבָךְ normative stress /ʃoˈvaχ/, colloquial stress /ˈʃovaχ/, "dovecote". This is also common in the colloquial pronunciation of many personal names, for example דָּוִד normative stress /daˈvid/, colloquial stress /ˈdavid/, "David".[28]

Specific rules correlate the location or absence of stress in a syllable with the written representation of vowel length and whether or not the syllable ends with a vowel or a consonant.[nb 1] Because spoken Israeli Hebrew does not distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are not evident in speech. They usually cannot be inferred from written text either, because usually vowel diacritics are omitted. The result is that nowadays stress has phonemic value, as the following table illustrates: acoustically, the following word pairs differ only in the location of the stress; orthographically they differ also in the written representation of the length of the vowels, however if vowel diacritics are omitted (as is usually the case in Modern Israeli Hebrew) they are written identically:

common spelling
(Ktiv Hasar Niqqud)
mil‘él-stressed milrá-stressed
spelling with
vowel diacritics
pronunciation translation spelling with
vowel diacritics
pronunciation translation
ילדיֶלֶד/ˈjeled/boyיֵלֵד/jeˈled/will give birth
אוכלאֹכֶל/ˈoχel/foodאוֹכֵל/oˈχel/eating (masculine
singular participle)
בוקרבֹּקֶר/ˈbokeʁ/morningבּוֹקֵר/boˈkeʁ/cowboy

Little ambiguity exists, however, due to context and syntactic features; compare e.g. the English word "conduct" in its nominal and verbal forms.

Vocabulary

Modern Israeli Hebrew has borrowed many words from Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic (spoken Arabic, mainly Judeo Arabic and Palestinian Arabic), German, Latin, Greek, Polish, Russian, English and other languages. Some typical examples are:

loanwordderivativesorigin
HebrewIPAmeaningHebrewIPAmeaninglanguagespellingmeaning
ביי/baj/goodbye Englishbye
אגזוז/eɡˈzoz/exhaust
system
 exhaust
system
דיג׳יי/ˈdidʒej/DJלדג׳ה/ledaˈdʒe/to DJto DJ
ואללה/ˈwala/really!? Arabicواللهreally!?
כיף/kef/funלכייף/lekaˈjef/to have fun[w 1]كيفpleasure
חפיף/χaˈfif/lightlyלהתחפף/lehitχaˈfef/to scram[w 2]خَفِيفlightly
אבא/ˈaba/daddy Aramaicאבאthe father
חלטורה/χalˈtura/shoddy jobלחלטר/leχalˈter/to moonlightRussianхалтураshoddy work[w 3]
בלגן/balaˈɡan/messלבלגן/levalˈɡen/to make a messбалаганchaos[w 3]
תכל׳ס/ˈtaχles/directly Yiddishתכליתgoal
חרופ/χrop/deep sleepלחרופ/laχˈrop/to sleep deeplyחְרוֹפּsleep
שפכטל/ˈʃpaχtel/putty knife GermanSpachtelputty knife
גומי/ˈɡumi/rubberגומיה/ɡumiˈja/rubber bandGummirubber
גזוז/ɡaˈzoz/carbonated
beverage
 Turkish
from
French
gazoz[w 4]
from
eau gazeuse
carbonated
beverage
פוסטמה/pusˈtema/stupid woman Ladino inflamed wound[w 5]
אדריכל/adriˈχal/architectאדריכלות/adriχaˈlut/architectureAkkadianarad-ekallitemple servant[w 6]
Sources
  1. bitFormation. "Loanwords in Hebrew from Arabic". Safa-ivrit.org. Retrieved 2014-08-26.
  2. "morfix dictionary". Morfix.mako.co.il. Retrieved 2014-08-26.
  3. 3.0 3.1 bitFormation. "Loanwords in Hebrew from Russian". Safa-ivrit.org. Retrieved 2014-08-26.
  4. bitFormation. "Loanwords in Hebrew from Turkish". Safa-ivrit.org. Retrieved 2014-08-26.
  5. bitFormation. "Loanwords in Hebrew from Ladino". Safa-ivrit.org. Retrieved 2014-08-26.
  6. אתר השפה העברית. "Loanwords in Hebrew from Akkadian". Safa-ivrit.org. Retrieved 2014-08-26.

Bibliography

Notes

  1. These rules are sometimes slightly different for verbs and nouns; thus the stress in the noun דָּבָר (/daˈvar/, "thing") and the verb גָּבַר (/ɡaˈvar/ "to overpower") are both on the last syllable, even though this syllable is pointed with the sign for a long vowel for the noun and for a short vowel for the verb. Modern classification of vowel diacritics according to the vowel length they allegedly denote, however, might not concur with the historically correct phonological distinction between vowel lengths, see Tiberian vocalization → Full vowels.

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Modern Hebrew at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. "The differences between English and Hebrew". Frankfurt International School. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  3. Meir & Sandler, 2013, A Language in Space: The Story of Israeli Sign Language
  4. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Hebrew". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  5. "Hebrew vs. Israeli". The Jewish Daily Forward. December 24, 2004. Retrieved 25 January 2014.
  6. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Eric Hobsbawm, Cambridge University Press, 2012 (first edition 1990): "What would the future of Hebrew have been, had not the British Mandate in 1919 accepted it as one of the three official languages of Palestine, at a time when the number of people speaking Hebrew as an everyday language was less than 20,000?"
  7. Politics and Education in Israel: Comparisons with the United States, Shlomo Swirski, Routledge, 2004: "In retrospect, [Hobsbawm's] question should be rephrased, substituting the Rothschild house for the British state and the 1880s for 1919. For by the time the British conquered Palestine, Hebrew had become the everyday language of a small but well-entrenched community."
  8. Palestine Mandate (1922): "English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine"
  9. Klein, Zeev (March 18, 2013). "A million and a half Israelis struggle with Hebrew". Israel Hayom. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  10. Nachman Gur, Behadrey Haredim. "Kometz Aleph – Au• How many Hebrew speakers are there in the world?". Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  11. Laufer A. (1999), "Hebrew", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Vol. 20.2, England, 1990, pp. 40-43; or Handbook of the International Phonetic Association 1999, pp. 96-99
  12. Paul Wexler (1990). The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 5–. ISBN 978-3-447-03063-2.
  13. Blau, Joshua, Tehiyyát ha'ivrít ut'hiyyát ha'aravít hasifrutít: kavím makbilím umafridím (The Renaissance of Hebrew in the Light of the Renaissance of Standard Arabic) (=Texts and Studies, vol. ix), Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1976; Blau, Joshua, The Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic: Parallels and Differences in the Revival of Two Semitic Languages (=Near Eastern Studies, vol. xviii), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981.
  14. Wexler, Paul, The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past: 1990.
  15. Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages: With Special Attention to Judaized Arabic, Chinese, German, Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Slavic (modern Hebrew/Yiddish), Spanish, and Karaite, and Semitic Hebrew/Ladino, Paul Wexler, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006, "This view of Modern Israeli Hebrew, needless to say, has met with hostility (and also, unfortunately, with almost no serious discussion of the data) in Hebrew linguistic circles, in part because of the pressure of Zionist ideological needs."
  16. Izre'el, Shlomo (2003). "The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew." In: Benjamin H. Hary (ed.), Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew: Towards the Compilation of The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH)", Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, 2003, pp. 85-104.
  17. Izre'el, Shlomo (1986). "Was the Revival of the Hebrew Language a Miracle? On Pidginization and Creolization Processes in the Creation of Modern Hebrew." Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress for Jewish Studies, Part 4, Vol. 1: Hebrew and Judaic Languages; Other Languages. Jerusalem. 1986. 77-84. (In Hebrew)
  18. Goldenberg, Gideon (1996). "Ha'ivrit kelashon shemit xaya." In: Evolution and Renewal: Trends in the Development of the Hebrew Language. (Publications of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Section of Humanities.) Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 148-190. (In Hebrew.)
  19. Kuzar, R. (2001). Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse-Analytic Cultural Study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  20. Ghil'ad Zuckermann. "Language Revival and Multiple Causation: The mosaic Genesis of the Israeli Language". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 25 January 2014.
  21. "Zuckermann, Ghil'had (2005). ''Abba, Why Was Professor Higgins Trying to Teach Eliza to Speak Like Our Cleaning Lady?: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, Prescriptivism and the Real Sounds of the Israeli Language''" (PDF). Retrieved 2014-08-26.
  22. Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "Complement Clause Types in Israeli", Complementation: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 72-92.
  23. See p. 62 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "A New Vision for 'Israeli Hebrew': Theoretical and Practical Implications of Analysing Israel's Main Language as a Semi-Engineered Semito-European Hybrid Language", Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5 (1), pp. 57-71.
  24. Ibid., p. 63.
  25. ibid.
  26. Robert Hetzron. (1987). Hebrew. In The World's Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie, 686–704. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-520521-9.
  27. Choueka, Yaakov (1997). Rav-Milim: A comprehensive dictionary of Modern Hebrew. Tel-Aviv: CET. ISBN 965-448-323-8.
  28. Netser, Nisan, Niqqud halakha le-maase, 1976, p. 11.

External links