|
|
|
|
Hebrew language
|
| |
|
| |
Hebrew () is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world. It is one of the official languages of Israel, along with Arabic. Hebrew is also spoken as a mother tongue by the Samaritans, though today fewer than a thousand Samaritans remain. As a foreign language it is studied mostly by Jews and students of Judaism and Israel, archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations and by theologians.
The modern word "Hebrew" is derived from the word "ivri" which in turn may be based upon the root "`avar" meaning "to cross over".
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Hebrew language' Start a new discussion about 'Hebrew language' Answer questions from other users |
Encyclopedia
Hebrew () is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world. It is one of the official languages of Israel, along with Arabic. Hebrew is also spoken as a mother tongue by the Samaritans, though today fewer than a thousand Samaritans remain. As a foreign language it is studied mostly by Jews and students of Judaism and Israel, archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations and by theologians.
The modern word "Hebrew" is derived from the word "ivri" which in turn may be based upon the root "`avar" meaning "to cross over". The related name Ever occurs in Genesis 10:21 and possibly means "the one who traverses". In the Bible "Hebrew" is called because Judah () was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation, late 8th century (Is 36, 2 Kings 18). In Isaiah 19:18, it is also called the "Language of Canaan" (?????? ????????).
The core of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) is written in Classical Hebrew, and much of its present form is specifically the dialect of Biblical Hebrew that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, around the time of the Babylonian exile. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as , "The Holy Language", since ancient times.
History
As a language, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Hebrew (Israel) and Moabite (Jordan) are Southern Canaanite while Phoenician (Lebanon) is Northern Canaanite. Canaanite is closely related to Aramaic and to a lesser extent South-Central Arabic. Whereas other Canaanite languages and dialects have become extinct, Hebrew has survived. Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in Canaan from the 10th century BCE until the Babylonian exile.
Around the 6th century BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the ancient Kingdom of Judah, destroying much of Jerusalem and exiling its population far to the East in Babylon. During the Babylonian captivity, many Israelites were enslaved within the Babylonian Empire and learned the Aramaic language of their captors. The Babylonians had taken mainly the governing classes of Israel while leaving behind in Israel presumably more-compliant farmers and laborers to work the land. Thus for a significant period, the Jewish elite became influenced by Aramaic. (see below, Aramaic spoken among Israelites).
After Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, he released the Jewish people from captivity. The King of Kings or Great King of Persia, later gave the Israelites permission to return. Hebrew came to be spoken alongside new dialects of Hebrew and a local version of Aramaic. Yet, Aramaic represented the hated language of slavery, conquest, and occupation; while Hebrew remained the language of Israel's history and national pride. Preserved largely by the remant in Israel proper, Hebrew continued to be a thriving language until shortly before the Byzantine era.
From the beginning of the 1st millennium Hebrew continued in use as a religious and literary language until the 19th century, when it was revived as a spoken language. After the 2nd century CE when the Roman Empire exiled most of the Jewish population of Jerusalem following the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Israelites adapted to the societies in which they found themselves, yet letters, contracts, commerce, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry, and laws continued to be written in Hebrew, which adapted by borrowing and inventing terms.
Hebrew persevered along the ages as the main language for written purposes by all Jewish communities around the world for a large range of uses (poetry, philosophy, science and medicine, commerce, daily correspondence and contracts, in addition to liturgy). This meant not only that well-educated Jews in all parts of the world could correspond in a mutually intelligible language, and that books and legal documents published or written in any part of the world could be read by Jews in all other parts, but that an educated Jew could travel and converse with Jews in distant places, just as priests and other educated Christians could once converse in Latin. It has been 'revived' several times as a literary language, and most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th century. Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of the national revival (Hibbat Tziyon, later Zionism), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language. Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time. Those languages were Jewish dialects such as Ladino (also called Judezmo), Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic, or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian, Persian, and Arabic.
The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along the 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew. New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) and Aramaic. Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French. Modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921 (along with English and Arabic), and then in 1948 became an official language of the newly declared State of Israel. Hebrew is the most widely spoken language in Israel today.
Origins
Hebrew is a Semitic language and as such a member of the larger Afro-Asiatic phylum.
Within Semitic, the Northwest Semitic languages formed around the 3rd millennium BCE, grouped with the Arabic languages as Central Semitic. The Canaanite languages are a group within Northwest Semitic, emerging in the 2nd millennium BCE in the Levant, gradually separating from Aramaic and Ugaritic.
Within the Canaanite group, Hebrew belongs to the sub-group also containing Edomite, Ammonite and Moabite. Another Canaanite sub-group contains Phoenician and its descendant Punic.
Gezer calendar and other archaic inscriptions
The first written evidence of distinctive Hebrew, the Gezer calendar, dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. Classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks and Etruscans later became the Roman script. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it.
In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered what he says is the oldest known Hebrew inscription. A 3,000-year-old pottery shard bearing five lines of faded characters were found in the ruins of an ancient town south of Jerusalem. Garfinkel noted that the find suggests Biblical accounts of the ancient Israelite kingdom of David could have been based on written texts.
Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example Protosinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from Egyptian. One ancient document is the famous Moabite Stone written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam Inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Archaic Hebrew include the ostraka found near Lachish which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BC.
Classical Hebrew
In its widest sense, Classical Hebrew means the spoken language of ancient Israel flourishing between the 10th century BCE and the turn of the 4th century CE. It comprises several evolving and overlapping dialects. The phases of Classical Hebrew are often named after important literary works associated with them.
- Archaic Biblical Hebrew from the 10th to the 6th century BCE, corresponding to the Monarchic Period until the Babylonian Exile and represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible (Tanach), notably the Song of Moses (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). Also called Old Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew. It was written in a form of the Canaanite script. (A script descended from this is still used by the Samaritans, see Samaritan Hebrew language.)
- Biblical Hebrew around the 6th century BCE, corresponding to the Babylonian Exile and represented by the bulk of the Hebrew Bible that attains much of its present form around this time. Also called Classical Biblical Hebrew (or Classical Hebrew in the narrowest sense).
- Late Biblical Hebrew, from the 6th to the 4th century BCE, that corresponds to the Persian Period and is represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible, notably the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Basically similar to Classical Biblical Hebrew, apart from a few foreign words adopted for mainly governmental terms, and some syntactical innovations such as the use of the particle shel (of, belonging to). It adopted the Imperial Aramaic script.
- Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, corresponding to the Hellenistic and Roman Periods before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and represented by the Qumran Scrolls that form most (but not all) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Commonly abbreviated as DSS Hebrew, also called Qumran Hebrew. The Imperial Aramaic script of the earlier scrolls in the 3rd century BCE evolved into the Hebrew square script of the later scrolls in the 1st century CE, also known as ketav Ashuri (Assyrian script), still in use today.
- Mishnaic Hebrew from the 1st to the 3rd or 4th century CE, corresponding to the Roman Period after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and represented by the bulk of the Mishnah and Tosefta within the Talmud and by the Dead Sea Scrolls, notably the Bar Kokhba Letters and the Copper Scroll. Also called Tannaitic Hebrew or Early Rabbinic Hebrew.
Sometimes the above phases of spoken Classical Hebrew are simplified into "Biblical Hebrew" (including several dialects from the tenth century BCE to 2nd century BCE and extant in certain Dead Sea Scrolls) and "Mishnaic Hebrew" (including several dialects from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE and extant in certain other Dead Sea Scrolls). However today, most Hebrew linguists classify Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew as a set of dialects evolving out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew, thus including elements from both but remaining distinct from either. By the start of the Byzantine Period in the 4th century CE, Classical Hebrew ceases as a regularly spoken language, roughly a century after the publication of the Mishnah, apparently declining since the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba War around 135 CE.
Mishnah and Talmud
The term generally refers to the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud , excepting quotations from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects organize into Mishnaic Hebrew (also called Tannaitic Hebrew, Early Rabbinic Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew I), which was a spoken language, and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew II), which was a literary language.
The earlier section of the Talmud is the Mishnah that was published around 200 CE and was written in the earlier Mishnaic dialect. The dialect is also found in certain Dead Sea Scrolls. Mishnaic Hebrew is considered to be one of the dialects of Classical Hebrew that functioned as a living language in the land of Israel.
A transitional form of the language occurs in the other works of Tannaitic literature dating from the century beginning with the completion of the Mishnah. These include the halachic Midrashim (Sifra, Sifre, Mechilta etc.) and the expanded collection of Mishnah-related material known as the Tosefta . The Talmud contains excerpts from these works, as well as further Tannaitic material not attested elsewhere; the generic term for these passages is Baraitot. The dialect of all these works is very similar to Mishnaic Hebrew.
About a century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew fell into disuse as a spoken language. The later section of the Talmud, the Gemara , generally comments on the Mishnah and Baraitot in Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which sometimes occurs in the text of the Gemara.
Medieval Hebrew
After the Talmud, various regional literary dialects of Medieval Hebrew evolved. The most important is Tiberian Hebrew or Masoretic Hebrew, a local dialect of Tiberias in Galilee that became the standard for vocalizing the Hebrew Bible and thus still influences all other regional dialects of Hebrew. This Tiberian Hebrew from the 7th to 10th century CE is sometimes called "Biblical Hebrew" because it is used to pronounce the Hebrew Bible; however properly it should be distinguished from the historical Biblical Hebrew of the 6th century BCE, whose original pronunciation must be reconstructed.
Tiberian Hebrew incorporates the remarkable scholarship of the Masoretes (from masoret meaning "tradition"), who added vowel points and grammar points to the Hebrew letters to preserve much earlier features of Hebrew, for use in chanting the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretes inherited a biblical text whose letters were considered too sacred to be altered, so their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters. The Syriac script, precursor to the Arabic script, also developed vowel pointing systems around this time. The Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible with the Masoretic pointing, was written in the 10th century likely in Tiberias and survives to this day. It is perhaps the most important Hebrew manuscript in existence.
In the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain important work was done by grammarians in explaining the grammar and vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew; much of this was based on the work of the grammarians of Classical Arabic. Important Hebrew grammarians were Judah ben David Hayyuj, Jonah ibn Janah and later (in Provence) David Kimhi. A great deal of poetry was written, by poets such as Dunash ben Labrat, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi and the two Ibn Ezras, in a "purified" Hebrew based on the work of these grammarians, and in Arabic quantitative or strophic metres. This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets.
The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to a distinct style of philosophical Hebrew. This is used in the translations made by the Ibn Tibbon family. (Original Jewish philosophical works were usually written in Arabic.)
Another important influence was Maimonides, who developed a simple style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code, the Mishneh Torah. Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and the Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud.
Liturgical use
Hebrew has always been used as the language of prayer and study, and the following pronunciation systems are found.
Ashkenazi Hebrew, originating in Central and Eastern Europe, is still widely used in Ashkenazi Jewish religious services and studies in Israel and abroad, particularly in the Haredi and other Orthodox communities. It was influenced by the Yiddish language.
Sephardi Hebrew is the traditional pronunciation of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and Sephardi Jews in the countries of the former Ottoman Empire. This pronunciation, in the form used by the Jerusalem Sephardic community, is the basis of the Hebrew phonology of Israeli native speakers. It was influenced by the Ladino language.
Mizrahi (Oriental) Hebrew is actually a collection of dialects spoken liturgically by Jews in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world. It was possibly influenced by the Aramaic and Arabic languages, and in some cases by Sephardi Hebrew, although some linguists maintain that it is the direct heir of Biblical Hebrew and thus represents the true dialect of Hebrew. The same claim is sometimes made for Yemenite Hebrew or Temanit, which differs from other Mizrahi dialects by having a radically different vowel system.
These pronunciations are still used in synagogue ritual and religious study, in Israel and elsewhere, mostly by people who are not native speakers of Hebrew, though some traditionalist Israelis are bi-dialectal.
Many synagogues in the diaspora, even though Ashkenazi by rite and by ethnic composition, have adopted the "Sephardic" pronunciation in deference to Israeli Hebrew. However, in many British and American schools and synagogues, this pronunciation retains several elements of its Ashkenazi substrate, especially the distinction between tsere and segol.
Modern Hebrew
Development
In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary Hebrew tradition as pronounced in Jerusalem revived as the spoken language of modern Israel, called variously Israeli Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, New Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew, Standard Hebrew, and so on. Israeli Hebrew exhibits many features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic.
The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Hameassef (The Gatherer), was published by Maskilim litterati in Königsberg from 1783 onwards. In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. HaMagid, founded in Lyck, Prussia, in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Chaim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language.
The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated by the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) . He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 immigrated to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora "shtetl" lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language.
However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by different grammar and style, in the writings of people like Achad Ha-Am and others. His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into a gradually accepted movement. It was not, however, until the 1904-1914 "second aliyah" that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the more highly organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants. When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country's three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion. A constructed modern language with a truly Semitic vocabulary and written appearance, although often European in phonology, was to take its place among the current languages of the nations.
Reactions
While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous (because Hebrew was the holy language of the Torah and therefore some thought that it should not be used to discuss common everyday matters), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of the Palestine Mandate who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. Later it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an organization that still exists today. The results of his and the Committee's work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew). The seeds of Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine. At the time, members of the Old Yishuv and a very few Chasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar, refused to speak Hebrew and only spoke Yiddish. However, while this ideological stance persists in certain quarters, almost all members of these groups have learned modern Hebrew in order to interact with outsiders.
Russia and the Soviet Union
Russian has separate terms for Ancient Hebrew (??????????????? ????, "ancient Jewish language") and Modern Hebrew (????? (Ivrit), directly borrowed from the Hebrew name).
The Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew "reactionary" since it was associated with both Judaism and Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education) as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself didn't cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes). The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being the spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be treated as a foreign language. Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests in the West, a policy of suppression of the teaching of Hebrew operated from the 1930s on. Later in the 1980s in the USSR, Hebrew studies reappeared due to people struggling for permission to go to Israel (refuseniks). Several of the teachers were imprisoned, for example, Ephraim Kholmyansky,Yevgeny Korostyshevsky and others responsible for a Hebrew learning network connecting many cities of USSR.
Birobidzhan
Birobidzhan Jewish National University works in cooperation with the local Jewish community of Birobidzhan. The university is unique in the Russian Far East. The basis of the training course is study of the Hebrew language, history and classic Jewish texts. In recent years, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast has grown interested in its Jewish roots. Students study Hebrew and Yiddish at a Jewish school and Birobidzhan Jewish National University. In 1989, the Jewish center founded its Sunday school, where children study Yiddish, learn folk Jewish dance, and learn about the history of Israel. The Israeli government helps fund the program. Chief Rabbi Mordechai Scheiner has commented the progress at School No. 2, Birobidjan's Jewish public school with 670 students, 30 percent of whom are Jewish. Pupils learn about Jewish history, and the Hebrew and Yiddish languages.
Modern Israeli Hebrew
Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation. However, the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native tongue and often brought into Hebrew idioms and literal translations from Yiddish. Similarly, the language as spoken in Israel has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in the following respects:
- the elimination of pharyngeal articulation in the letters chet and ayin
- the conversion of from an alveolar flap to a voiced uvular fricative or trill (see Guttural R)
- the pronunciation (by many speakers) of tzere as in some contexts (sifrey and teysha instead of Sephardic sifré and tésha )
- the gradual elimination of vocal schwa (zman instead of Sephardic zeman)
- in popular speech, penultimate stress in proper names (Dvóra instead of Devorá; Yehúda instead of Yehudá)
- similarly in popular speech, penultimate stress in nouns or verbs with a second or third person plural suffix (katávtem "you wrote" instead of ketavtém).
Classification
Although the vast majority of scholars see Modern Hebrew as a direct continuation of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, while conceding that it has acquired some foreign vocabulary and syntactical features, in much the same way as Modern Greek, Modern Japanese etc. have evolved, two dissenting views are as follows:
- Paul Wexler claims that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language at all, but a dialect of "Judaeo-Sorbian". He argues that the underlying structure of the language is Slavic, but "re-lexified" to absorb much of the vocabulary and inflexional system of Hebrew in much the same way as a creole. This view forms part of a larger complex of theories, such as that Ashkenazi Jews are predominantly descended from Slavic and Turkic tribes rather than from the ancient Israelites, none of which are accepted by mainstream scholarship.
- Ghil'ad Zuckermann compromises between Wexler and the majority view: according to him, "Israeli" (his term for Israeli 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. Thus, "Yiddish is a primary contributor to Israeli Hebrew because it was the mother tongue of the vast majority of revivalists and first pioneers in Eretz Yisrael at the crucial period of the beginning of Israeli Hebrew". According to Zuckermann, although the revivalists wished to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, they could not avoid the Ashkenazi mindset arising from their European background. He argues that their attempt to deny their European roots, negate diasporism and avoid hybridity (as reflected in Yiddish) failed. "Had the revivalists been Arabic-speaking or Berber-speaking Jews (e.g. from Morocco), Israeli Hebrew would have been a totally different language – both genetically and typologically, much more Semitic. The impact of the founder population on Israeli Hebrew is incomparable with that of later immigrants."
So far, neither view has gained significant acceptance among mainstream linguists, and has been criticized by some as being based less on linguistic evidence than post- or anti-Zionist political motivations. However, some linguists, for example American Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz, have employed Zuckermann's glottonym "Israeli" and accept his notion of hybridity. Few would dispute that Hebrew has acquired some European features as a result of having been learned by immigrants as a second language at a crucial formative stage. The identity of the European substrate/adstrate has varied: in the time of the Mandate and the early State, the principal contributor was Yiddish, while today it is American English. There has also been some influence, on vocabulary rather than structure, from Arabic, both in the form of Palestinian Arabic and, during the large scale immigrations of Mizrahi Jews during the 1950-60s, the Yemenite and North African dialects. Some Russian influence may also be observed, both during the founding period and as a result of recent immigration.
Regional dialects
According to Ethnologue, the currently spoken dialects of Hebrew are "Standard Hebrew (Modern Israeli Hebrew)", Sephardi Hebrew, Oriental Hebrew or Mizrahi Hebrew and Yemenite Hebrew". These refer to two varieties used for actual communication by native speakers in Israel; they differ mainly in pronunciation, and hardly in any other way.
Immigrants to Israel are encouraged to adopt "Standard Hebrew" as their daily language. Phonologically, this "dialect" may most accurately be described as an amalgam of pronunciations preserving Sephardic vowel sounds and some Ashkenazic consonant sounds with Yiddish-style influence, its recurring feature being simplification of differences among a wide array of pronunciations. This simplifying tendency also accounts for the collapse of the Ashkenazic and allophones of into the single phone . Most Sephardic and Mizrahi dialects share this feature, though some (such as those of Iraq and Yemen) differentiate between these two pronunciations as and . Within Israel, however, the pronunciation of Hebrew more often reflects the diasporic origin of the individual speaker, rather than the specific recommendations of the Academy. For this reason, over half the population pronounces as (a uvular trill, as in Yiddish and French) or as (a voiced uvular fricative, as in Standard German), rather than as , an alveolar trill, as in Spanish and Italian. The pronunciation of this phoneme is often used among Israelis as a shibboleth or determinant when ascertaining the national origin of perceived foreigners.
There are mixed views on the status of the two dialects. On the one hand, prominent Israelis of Sephardic or Oriental origin are admired for the purity of their speech and Yemenite Jews are often employed as newsreaders. On the other hand, the speech of middle-class Ashkenazim is regarded as having a certain Central European sophistication, and many speakers of Mizrahi origin have moved nearer to this version of Standard Hebrew, in some cases even adopting the uvular resh.
It was formerly the case that the inhabitants of the north of Israel pronounced beth rafe (bet without dagesh, literally loose beth: ) as instead of , in accordance with the conservative Sephardic pronunciation . This was regarded as rustic and has since disappeared. It is said that one can tell an inhabitant of Jerusalem by the pronunciation of the word for two hundred as "ma'atayim" (??????, as distinct from "matayim", as heard elsewhere in the country). Today, Israeli Hebrew is virtually uniform, the only noticeable variation being along ethnic lines. It is widely felt that these differences, too, have been disappearing among the younger generation.
Aramaic
Aramaic is a North-West Semitic language, like Canaanite. Its name derives either from "" in Upper Mesopotamia or from "Aram", an ancient name for Syria. Various dialects of Aramaic coevolved with Hebrew throughout much of its history, as major languages in the region. The words in Greek and Hebrew at the time corresponding to the word "Hebrew" (?ß?a??, ?ß?a?st?, ????? ??????) are distinguished from Aramaic s???st? s???a??.
The Persian Empire that captured Babylonia a few decades later adopted Imperial Aramaic as the official international language of the Persian Empire. The Israelite population, who had been exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem and its surrounding region of Judah, were allowed to return to Jerusalem to establish a Persian province, usually called Judea. Thus under occupation and enslavement, Aramaic became the administrative language for Judea when dealing with the rest of the Persian Empire.
The Aramaic script also evolved from the Paleo-Semitic script, but they diverged significantly. By the 1st century CE, the Aramaic script developed into the distinctive Hebrew square script (also known as Assyrian Script, Ktav Ashuri), extant in the Dead Sea Scrolls and similar to the script still in use today.
One of several languages known to Jesus was a dialect of Aramaic. Those in the North of Israel, in Galilee, interacted with Aramaic-speaking societies to the North and East, including for trade. Under Roman occupation, they also spoke some Greek or Latin. In the South around Jerusalem, and in Tiberias, the Jews spoke Hebrew.
Displacement
By the early half of the 20th century, most scholars followed Geiger and Dalman in thinking that Aramaic became a spoken language in the land of Israel by the start of Israel's Hellenistic Period in the 4th century BCE, and that as a corollary Hebrew ceased to function as a spoken language around the same time. Segal, Klausner, and Ben Yehuda are notable exceptions to this view. During the latter half of the 20th century, accumulating archaeological evidence and especially linguistic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls has disproven that view. The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in 1946-1948 near Qumran revealed ancient Jewish texts overwhelmingly in Hebrew, not Aramaic.
The Qumran scrolls indicate that Hebrew texts were readily understandable to the average Israelite, and that the language had evolved since Biblical times as spoken languages do. Recent scholarship recognizes that reports of Jews speaking in Aramaic indicates a multi-lingual society, not necessarily the primary language spoken. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew co-existed within Israel as a spoken language.
Some further evidence for this contention has been found in the Christian Bible, in which rare occasions of a person speaking in Aramaic are given special attention as being unusual. Rather than dialogue being primarily in Aramaic with the exceptional Hebrew, the New Testament presupposes dialogue in Hebrew and points out Aramaic discussions as being exceptions to normal speech.
Similarly, Paul is portrayed as speaking to a crowd of Jews tęi hebraďdi dialéktôi lit.'in the Hebrew dialect'. A commonly proposed translation for this Greek passage is 'in the Aramaic vernacular of Palestine'. Such a translation ignores, of course, the fact that Aramaic has a standard word in Greek s???st?/s???a?? (cf. LXX Job 42:17ff, and Dan 2:4.), it is really only based on place names that are called Hebrew and that had an Aramaizing etymology. In a groundbreaking article Grintz suggested that Hebrew, rather than Aramaic, lay behind the composition of the Gospel of Matthew. Grintz dates the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman Period. Hebrew nonetheless continued on as a literary language down through Byzantine Period from the 4th century CE.
The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for the land of Israel. Hebrew functioned as the local mother tongue with powerful ties to Israel's history, origins, and golden age and as the language of Israel's religion; Aramaic functioned as the international language with the rest of the Mideast; and eventually Greek functioned as another international language with the eastern areas of the Roman Empire. Communities of Jews (and non-Jews) are known, who immigrated to Judea from these other lands and continued to speak Aramaic or Greek.
Many Hebrew linguists postulate the survival of Hebrew as a spoken language until the Byzantine Period, but some historians do not accept this. The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls distinguishes the Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew from the various dialects of Biblical Hebrew out of which it evolved: "This book presents the specific features of DSS Hebrew, emphasizing deviations from classical BH." The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church which once said, in 1958 in its first edition, that Hebrew "ceased to be a spoken language around the fourth century BCE", now says, in its 1997 (third) edition, that Hebrew "continued to be used as a spoken and written language in the New Testament period". An Introductory Grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew says, "It is generally believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the Copper Scroll and also the Bar Kokhba letters, have furnished clear evidence of the popular character of MH [Mishnaic Hebrew]." And so on. It is widespread among Israeli scholars to treat Hebrew as a spoken language as a feature of Judea's Roman Period.
Dialects
The international language of Aramaic radiated into various regional dialects. In and around Judea, various dialects of Old Western Aramaic emerged, including the Jewish dialect of Old Judean Aramaic during the Roman Period. Josephus Flavius initially drafted his account of The Jewish War in Old Judean Aramaic but later recast it into Koine Greek to publish it for the Roman imperial court. Unfortunately Josephus's Aramaic version has not survived.
Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Jews gradually began to disperse from Jerusalem to foreign countries, especially after the Bar Kokhba War in 135 CE when the Romans turned Jerusalem into a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina.
After the Bar Kokhba War in the 2nd century CE, the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic dialect emerged from obscurity out of the vicinity of Galilee to form one of the main dialects in the Western branch of Middle Aramaic. The Jerusalem Talmud (by the 5th century) used this Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, as did the Midrash Rabba (6th to 12th century). This dialect probably influenced the pronunciation of the 8th-century Tiberian Hebrew that vocalizes the Hebrew Bible.
Meanwhile over in Babylon, the Babylonian Talmud (by the 7th century) used Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, a Jewish dialect in the Eastern branch of Middle Aramaic. For centuries Jewish Babylonian remained the spoken language of Mesopotamian Jews and the Lishana Deni. In the area of Kurdistan, there is a modern Aramaic dialect descending from it that is still spoken by a few thousand Jews (and non-Jews), though it has largely given way to Arabic.
Hebrew continues to strongly influence all these various Jewish dialects of Aramaic.
Other coexisting languages
Besides Jewish dialects of Aramaic, other languages are highly influenced by Hebrew, such as Yiddish, Ladino, Karaite and Judeo-Arabic. Although none is completely derived from Hebrew, they all make extensive use of Hebrew loanwords.
The revival of Hebrew is often cited by proponents of international auxiliary languages as the best proof that languages long dead, with small communities, or modified or created artificially can become living languages used by a large number of people.
Phonology
Vowels
The Hebrew word for vowels is (??????????). 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 | othographic representation |
|---|
| "long" * | "short" * | "very short" / "interrupted" * |
|---|
| | (as in "spa")
| | | | | or
| (as in "bet")
| ?? ) or ( ? )
| | sometimes ( ? ) | | | (as in "ski")
| ( ?? )
| | | | or
| (as in "gore") | or ( ? )
| | | | | (as in "flu" but with no diphthongization)
| | | | | * 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, . |
In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew, except that is often pronounced as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.
Shva
The Niqqud sign "Shva" represents four grammatical entities: resting (nakh / ???), moving (na / ???), floating (merahef / ???????) and "bleating" or "bellowing" ('ga'ya' / ?????????). 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 ????????? (fem. you crumpled) is pronounced even though it should be mute, whereas the Shva Na in ????? (time), which theoretically should be pronounced, is usually mute . Sometimes the shva is pronounced like a tsere when accented, as in the prefix "ve" meaning "and".
One-letter prefixes
Hebrew uses a number of one-letter prefixes that are added to words for various purposes. These are called "Letters of Use" (Hebrew: ?????? ??????, Otiyot HaShimush). Such items include: the definite article ha- (="the"); prepositions be- (="in"), le- (="to"), mi- (="from"; a shortened version of the preposition min'); conjunctions ve- (="and"), she- (="that"), ke- (="as", "like").
The vowel accompanying each of these letters may differ from those listed above, depending on the first letter or vowel following it. The rules governing these changes are hardly observed in colloquial speech, as most speakers tend to employ the regular form. The correct form may be heard in more formal circumstances. For example, if a preposition is put before a word which begins with a moving Schwa, then the preposition takes the vowel (and the initial consonant may be weakened): colloquial be-kfar (="in a village") corresponds to the more formal bi-khfar.
The definite article may be inserted between a preposition or a conjunction and the word it refers to, creating composite words like mé-ha-kfar (="from the village"). The latter also demonstrates the change in the vowel of mi-. With be and le, the definite article is assimilated into the prefix, which then becomes ba or la. Thus *be-ha-matos becomes ba-matos (="in the plane"). Note that this does not happen to mé (the form of "min" or "mi-" used before the letter "he"), therefore mé-ha-matos is a valid form, which means "from the airplane".
* indicates that the given example is grammatically non standard
Consonants
The Hebrew word for consonants is . The following table lists the Hebrew consonants and their pronunciation in IPA transcription:
-
The pairs , and have historically been allophonic. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are phonemic, due to mergers involving formerly distinct sounds ( merging with , merging with , merging with ), loss of consonant gemination (which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic), and the introduction of syllable-initial through foreign borrowings.
was once pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. Most modern Ashkenazi Jews do not differentiate between and ; however, Mizrahi Jews and Arabs pronounce these phonemes. Georgian Jews pronounce it as a glottalized q. Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it (like ng in sing) a pronunciation which 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. .)
Hebrew also has dagesh, a strengthening. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (kal, known also as dagesh lene) and heavy (hazak or dagesh forte). There are two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh: structural heavy (hazak tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazak mashlim). The light affects the phonemes (historically, also , and ) in the beginning of a word, or after a resting schwa. Structural heavy emphases belong to certain vowel patterns (mishkalim and binyanim; see the section on grammar below), and correspond originally to doubled consonants. Complementing strengthening is added when vowel assimilation takes place. As mentioned before, the emphasis influences which of a pair of (former) allophones is pronounced. Historical evidence indicates that , and also used to have allophones marked by the presence or absence of dagesh kal: these have disappeared from modern Hebrew pronunciation though the distinction in writing still appears in fully pointed texts. All consonants except gutturals and may receive the heavy emphasis (dagesh hazak).
Historical sound changes
Standard (non-Oriental) Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has undergone a number of splits and mergers in its development from Biblical Hebrew.
- BH had two allophones, and ; the allophone has merged with into SIH
- BH had two allophones, and ; the allophone has merged with into SIH , while the allophone has merged with into SIH
- BH and have merged into SIH
- BH and have usually merged into SIH , but this distinction may also be upheld in educated speech of many Sephardim and some Ashkenazim
- BH had two allophones, and ; the incorporation of loanwords into Modern Hebrew has probably resulted in a split, so that and are separate phonemes.
Stress
Hebrew has two kinds of stress: on the last syllable (; ????) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, ; ?????). The former is more frequent, though spoken Hebrew admits of more stress variation than the official dialect. Specific rules connect the location or absence of stress in a syllable with vowel length and the syllable's ending. Theses rules are different for verbs and nouns; thus, the -stressed (="food") and ‘-stressed (="eats", masculine) differ only in the length of the vowels (and are written identically if vowels are not marked). However, due to the fact that Israeli Hebrew does not distinguish greatly between long and short vowels, these rules are not evident in everyday speech. They usually cannot be inferred from written text either, since usually vowels are not marked. The result is that nowadays stress has phonemic value, e.g. "???", when pronounced , means "boy", whereas when pronounced it means "will give birth to". Little ambiguity exists, however, due to nouns and verbs having incompatible roles in normal sentences. This is also true in English, for example, with the English word "conduct" in its nominal and verbal forms.
Grammar
Hebrew grammar is partly analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than grammatical cases. However, inflection plays a decisive role in the formation of the verbs and nouns. E.g. nouns have a construct state, called "smikhut", to denote the relationship of "belonging to": this is the converse of the genitive case of more inflected languages. Words in smikhut are often combined with hyphens. In modern speech, the use of the construct is sometimes interchangeable with the preposition "shel", meaning "of". There are many cases, however, where older declined forms are retained (especially in idiomatic expressions and the like), and "person"-enclitics are widely used to "decline" prepositions.
Writing system
Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet. Modern scripts are based on the "square" letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which was developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive Hebrew script is used in handwriting, but the letters tend to be more circular in form when written in cursive, and sometimes vary markedly from their printed equivalents. The medieval version of the cursive script forms the basis of another font, known as Rashi script, equivalent to italics, which is used for commentaries and marginal notes in religious texts.
Vowel signs
Original Biblical Hebrew text contained nothing but consonants and spaces and this is still the case with Torah scrolls that are used in synagogues. A system of writing vowels called niqqud (lit. "dotting") (from the root word meaning "points" or "dots") developed around the 5th Century CE. It is used today in printed Bibles and some other religious books and also in poetry, children's literature, and texts for beginning students of Hebrew. Most modern Hebrew texts contain only consonant letters, spaces and western-style punctuation and to facilitate reading without vowels matres lectionis (see below) are often inserted into words which would be written without them in a text with full niqqud. The niqqud system is sometimes used when it is necessary to avoid certain ambiguities of meaning (such as when context is insufficient to distinguish between two identically spelled words) and in the transliteration of foreign names.
Consonant letters
All Hebrew consonant phonemes are represented by a single letter (with some exceptions in Modern Hebrew). Although a single letter might represent two phonemes the letter "bet," for example, represents both and the two sounds are always related "hard" (plosive) and "soft" (fricative) forms, their pronunciation being very often determined by context. In fully pointed texts, the hard form normally has a dot, known as a dagesh, in its center.
There are twenty-seven symbols, representing twenty-two letters, in the Hebrew alphabet, which is called the "aleph bet" because of its first two letters. The letters are as follows: Aleph, Bet/Vet, Gimel, Dalet, He, Vav, Zayin, Chet, Tet, Yod (pronounced Yud by Israelis), Kaf/Chaf, Lamed, Mem, Nun, Samekh, Ayin, Pe/Fe, Tzadi, Qof (pronounced Koof by Israelis), Resh, Shin/Sin, Tav.
- The letters Bet, Kaf and Pay (historically, also the letters Gimel, Dalet and Tav) are softened to fricatives when following a vowel (except when doubled). In a fully pointed text, this distinction is indicated by the use of
dagesh to denote the hard sound. (Occasionally, a horizontal line called rafe, written above the letter, is used to indicate the softened sound.) This has led to the misconception that there are separate letters "Vet", "Chaf" and "Fay".The letter Shin/Sin is usually pronounced Sh, but occasionally S. In fully pointed texts, this distinction is indicated by a dot at the top left hand corner (for Sin) or the top right hand corner (for Shin). This may indicate that the pronunciation prevailing when the consonantal spelling of Hebrew was fixed was different from that prevailing when the system of pointing was devised, so that the Sin dot is a permanent reminder saying "this letter is spelled Shin but pronounced Samech". (In Samaritan Hebrew Shin is pronounced Sh wherever it occurs, and there is no "Sin".) Others regard Sin as a genuine phoneme separate from both Shin and Samech and believe that it must once have had a distinct pronunciation.There are two written forms of the letters Kaf/Chaf, Mem, Nun, Pe and Tzadi. Each of these is written differently when appearing at the end of a word than when appearing at the beginning or in the middle of the word. The version used at the end of a word is referred to as Final Kaf, Final Mem, etc. Except in the case of Mem, the difference is that the final form has a tail pointing straight down, whereas in the normal form it bends to the left to point to the next letter.
Mater lectionis
The letters he, vav and yod can represent consonantal sounds ( and , respectively) or serve as a markers for vowels. In the latter case, these letters are called "" ("" in Latin, "mothers of reading" in English).
The letter he at the end of a word usually indicates a final , which usually indicates feminine gender, or , which usually indicates masculine gender. In rare cases it may also indicate , such as in (Shlomo, Solomon). It may also indicate a possessive suffix for 3rd person feminine singular (her book), but in that case the he is not a mater lectionis but the consonant , although in spoken Hebrew the distinction is rarely made. In texts with niqqud the he is written with a mappiq in the latter case. Correct pronunciation must be guessed according to context and niqqud may be used for disambiguation.
Vav may represent or , and yod may represent or . Sometimes a double yud is used for or (this convention is derived from Yiddish). In some modern Israeli texts, the letter alef is used to indicate long sounds in foreign names, particularly those of Arabic origin.
In some words there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels (see Ktiv male), which is considered to be grammatically incorrect though instances are found as far back as Talmudic times. Spelling with matres lectionis is called male (full), while spelling without matres lectionis is called haser (deficient, sparse). In Talmudic times texts from Palestine were noticeably more inclined to male spellings than texts from Babylonia: this may reflect the influence of Greek, which had full alphabetic spelling. Similarly in the Middle Ages Ashkenazim tended to use male spellings under the influence of European languages, while Sephardim tended to use haser spellings under the influence of Arabic.
Indicating stress
There is no one universally accepted sign for indicating stress in Hebrew texts. Usually stress is unmarked. In some vocalized texts, such as prayer books, when the stress is not on the last syllable it is marked with a small stroke placed underneath the first consonant of the stressed syllable to the left of the vowel mark (occasionally, as in Davidson's grammar, a different sign is used, to avoid confusion with meteg, see next paragraph). In vocalized Biblical texts stress is shown by the appropriate cantillation mark.
A secondary stress in a word may be marked with a vertical stroke, called a meteg, placed to the left of the vowel: this symbol is available in Unicode. Meteg is most usually found two syllables before the main stress: thus, when the following consonant carries a shva, it follows that that shva is a sounded one. (For example, the word ochlah, her food, is written in the same way as achela, she ate, but meteg on the first syllable shows that achela is intended.)
These signs are used, if at all, only in texts with niqqud.
See also
External links
General
- On-line resources for modern Hebrew
- Research and Learning Hebrew Resources
-
-
- Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar - written by Wilhelm Gesenius; 1910 edition, edited and enlarged by Emil Kautzsch; translated by Arthur Ernest Cowley; scanned public domain book
Dictionaries
- (Webster's Rosetta Edition)
-
Complete texts in Hebrew
- - The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud (Babylonian and Palestinian), Tosefta, and Mishneh Torah
- Thousands of pages of mid- to late-19th-century and early 20th-century newspapers written in Hebrew and readable on line. Including contemporary accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg, the assassination of Czar Alexander II, the Dreyfus affair, etc.
- - see also Alba Bible
-
- See also Benjamin Kennicott
-
-
-
-
-
-
|
| |
|
|
