Modern Hebrew

Modern Hebrew
Israeli Hebrew
עברית חדשה ʿivrít ḥadašá[h]
The word shalom as rendered in Modern Hebrew, including vowel points
Native to	Israel
Native speakers	9.0 million (2014)[1] including native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers.[2][3]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Hebrew Biblical Hebrew Modern Hebrew
Early forms	Biblical Hebrew Mishnaic Hebrew Medieval Hebrew Modern Hebrew
Writing system	Hebrew alphabet Hebrew Braille
Signed forms	Signed Hebrew (oral Hebrew accompanied by sign)[4]
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[5]
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 or Israeli Hebrew (Hebrew: עברית חדשה‎ ʿivrít ḥadašá[h] - "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew (עברית Ivrit), is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. Spoken in ancient times, Hebrew, a Canaanite language, was supplanted as the Jewish vernacular by the western dialect of Aramaic beginning in the third century BCE, though it continued to be used as a liturgical and literary language. It was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is one of the two official languages of Israel (along with Levantine Arabic).

Modern Hebrew is spoken by about nine million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers.^[2][3] Most speakers are citizens of Israel: about five million are Israelis who speak Modern Hebrew as their native language, 1.5 million are immigrants to Israel, 1.5 million are Arab citizens of Israel, whose first language is usually Arabic, and half a million are expatriate Israelis or diaspora Jews living outside Israel.

The organization 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.

Name

The most common scholarly term for the language is “Modern Hebrew” (Hebrew: עברית חדשה‎ ʿзivrít ħadašá[h]). Most people refer to it simply as Hebrew (Hebrew: עברית‎ Ivrit),^[6]

The term “Modern Hebrew” has been described as “somewhat problematic”^[7] as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew.^[7] Haiim B. Rosén supported the now widely-used^[7] term “Israeli Hebrew” on the basis that it “represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew”.^[6][8] In 2006, Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed the term “Israeli” to represent the multiple origins of the language.^[6] Nurit Dekel notes that the scholarly majority supporting the term ‘’Modern Hebrew’’ may be a result of the fact that “most of the researchers are dedicated to the Hebrew origins of the language”, and notes that a naming convention for the language including the term ‘’Hebrew’’ “originally represented a much wider range of views and intentions rather than just linguistic considerations”.^[6]

Background

The history of the Hebrew language is usually divided into four major periods: Biblical Hebrew, until about the 3rd century BCE, in which most of the Hebrew Bible is written; Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah and Talmud; Medieval Hebrew, from about the 6th to the 13th century CE, and Modern Hebrew, the language of the modern State of Israel.^[9]

Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during about 1200 to 586 BCE.^[10] Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile, when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic.

Hebrew ceased to be a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile Hebrew was restricted to liturgical use.^[11]

Revival

The revival of the Hebrew language was led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling, and Sephardic pronunciation. 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.^{[12][13][14][15]} Ben-Yehuda used a stock of 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries and codified and planned the new language, Modern Hebrew.^[16] For a simple comparison between the Sephardic version of Mishnaic Hebrew and the Yemenite version of the same, see Yemenite Hebrew.

Classification

Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family and the Canaanite branch of the North-West semitic subgroup.^{[17][18][19][20]} Although it has been influenced by non-Semitic languages, Modern Hebrew retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax.^[21] A minority of scholars argue that the revived language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid, or even Indo-European.^[22]

Some of the scholars presenting challenges to the standard classification are:

• Paul Wexler^[23] claims that modern Hebrew is not genealogically a Semitic language, but relexified "Judaeo-Sorbian". He argues that the underlying structure of the language is Slavic, but that it has adopted the vocabulary and inflectional system of Hebrew.
• Shlomo Izre'el^[24] focuses on the "emergence" of "Spoken Israeli Hebrew" in terms of a "creation of a new language" and attempts to fit the nativisation of this "new linguistic entity" into the "larger continuum of Creole and Creole-like languages", but does not seem to believe that it was relexified, either from a Slavic or any other linguistic substratum (with references to his own earlier work on the creolisation hypothesis (1986)^[25] and the works of Goldenberg (1996)^[26] and Kuzar (2001).^[27]
• Ghil'ad Zuckermann^[28][29] compromises between Wexler and the majority view: according to him, "Israeli" (his term for Modern Hebrew) is a Semito-European hybrid language, which is the continuation not only of literary Hebrew but also of Yiddish, as well as Polish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic and other languages spoken by Hebrew revivalists.^[30][31]

None of these proposals have been met with general acceptance and Modern Israeli Hebrew continues to be considered a Semitic language by most experts.^[32][18]

Modern Hebrew is based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew, and is commonly seen as a direct continuation of one or both. According to Hertzon (1987),

"It is futile to ask whether Modern Hebrew is the same language as the idiom of the Hebrew Bible. Clearly, the difference between them is great enough to make it impossible for the person who knows one to understand the other without effort. Biblical scholars have to study the modern language if they want to benefit from studies written in Hebrew today and Israelis cannot properly follow Biblical passages without having studied them at school. Yet a partial understanding is indeed possible and the similarities are so obvious that calling them separate languages or two versions of the same tongue would be an arbitrary, purely terminological decision."^[33]

Phonology

Modern Hebrew is phonetically simpler than Biblical Hebrew, having fewer phonemes, but is phonologically more complex. It has 25 to 27 consonants and 8 to 10 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.

The following table lists the consonant phonemes of Israeli Hebrew in IPA transcription:^[1]

¹ The pharyngeal consonants are very rare, being pronounced only by older Mizrahi speakers. Others replace them with the glottal consonants.^[1]

² The glottal consonants are not usually pronounced except in careful or formal speech.^[1]

³ Commonly transcribed /r/. This is usually pronounced as a velar fricative [ɣ], sometimes as a uvular fricative or approximant [ʁ], and sometimes as a uvular or alveolar trill, depending on the background of the speaker.^[1]

Obstruents assimilate in voicing: voiceless obstruents (/p t ts tʃ k, f s ʃ x/) become voiced ([b d dz dʒ ɡ, v z ʒ ɣ]) when they appear immediately before voiced obstruents, and vice versa. For example:

Hebrew has eight vowel phonemes, five short and three long:^[1]

Long vowels occur unpredictably where two identical vowels were historically separated by a pharyngeal or glottal consonant, and the first was stressed. Any of the five short vowels may be realized as a schwa [ə] when far from lexical stress. There are two diphthongs, /aj/ and /ej/.^[1]

Most lexical words have lexical stress on one of the last two syllable, of which the last syllable is the more frequent in formal speech. Loanwords may have stress on the antepenultimate syllable or even further back.

Morphology

Modern Hebrew morphology is essentially Biblical.^[34] Modern Hebrew has also maintained much of the inflectional morphology of its classical forbears. 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. Modern Hebrew has thus been able to expand its vocabulary effectively to meet the needs of casual vernacular, of science and technology, of journalism and belles lettres, while retaining the flavor of its ancient Semitic origins.

Loanwords

Modern Hebrew has loanwords from Arabic (mainly Judeo Arabic), Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Polish, Russian, English and other languages. Modern Hebrew has preserved many ancient Hebrew words which were originally loanwords from the languages of surrounding nations: Classical Hebrew literature borrowed from other Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian. Mishnaic Hebrew borrowed many nouns from Aramaic, as well as some from Greek. In the Middle Ages Hebrew borrowed heavily from Spanish, Greek, and Arabic. Some typical examples of Hebrew loanwords are:

Syntax

The syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic,^[34] while also showing the influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed over the past century.

Word Order

The word order of Modern Hebrew is predominately SVO (subject-verb-object). Biblical Hebrew was originally verb-subject-object (VSO), but drifted into SVO.^[35] Modern Hebrew maintains classical syntactic properties associated with VSO languages—it is prepositional rather than postpositional in making case and adverbial relations, auxiliary verbs precede main verbs; main verbs precede their complements, and noun modifiers (adjectives, determiners, and noun adjuncts) follow the head noun, hence in genitive constructions the possessee noun precedes the possessor. Moreover, Modern Hebrew allows and in cases requires sentences with a predicate initial.

Bibliography

• Haiim B. Rosén (1962). A Textbook of Israeli Hebrew. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-72603-8. 
• 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. 
• Ornan, Uzzi (2003). The Final Word: Mechanism for Hebrew Word Generation. Haifa University. 
• 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. 
• Matras, Yaron; Schiff, Leora (2005). "Spoken Israeli Hebrew revisited: Structures and variation" (PDF). Studia Semitica. Journal of Semitic Studies Jubilee Volume 16: 145–193. 
• Shlomo Izreʾel; Shlomo Raz (1996). Studies in Modern Semitic Languages. BRILL. ISBN 90-04-10646-4. 
• Stefan Weninger (23 December 2011). The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6. 
• Bergsträsser, Gotthelf (1983). Peter T. Daniels, ed. Introduction to the Semitic Languages: Text Specimens and Grammatical Sketches. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-0-931464-10-2. 
• 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. 
• Choueka, Yaakov (1997). Rav-Milim: A comprehensive dictionary of Modern Hebrew. Tel-Aviv: CET. ISBN 965-448-323-8. 

References

External links

• The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew - introduction by the Tel-Aviv University
• Hebrew Today - Should You Learn Modern Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew?
• History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language by David Steinberg
• Short History of the Hebrew Language by Chaim Menachem Rabin
• Academy of the Hebrew Language: How a Word is Born