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Hebrew is a Semitic language
of the Afro-Asiatic language
family spoken by 6 million
people mainly in Israel, parts
of the Palestinian
territories, the United States
and by Jewish communities
around the world. The core of
the Hebrew Bible, the Torah
(which Christianity and
Judaism traditionally hold to
have been first recorded in
the time of Moses 3,300 years
ago), is written in (Biblical)
Classical Hebrew. Jews have
always called it לשון הקודש
Lashon ha-Kodesh ("The Sacred
Language") as the scriptures
written in this language were
considered sacred. After the
first Destruction of Jerusalem
by the Babylonians in 586 BCE,
most scholars agree that the
kind of Hebrew prevalent in
the Hebrew Bible was replaced
in daily use by Mishnaic
Hebrew and a local version of
Aramaic. After the depletion
of the Jewish population of
parts of Roman occupied Judea,
it is believed that Hebrew
gradually ceased to be a
spoken language roughly around
200 CE, but has stayed as the
major written language
throughout the centuries. Not
only religious, but texts for
a large variety of purposes:
letters and contracts,
science, philosophy, medicine,
poetry, protocols of
courts—all resorted to Hebrew,
which thus adapted itself to
various new fields and
terminologies by borrowings
and new inventions.
Hebrew was revitalized as a
spoken language during the
late 19th and early 20th
century as Modern Hebrew,
replacing a score of languages
spoken by the Jews at that
time, such as Arabic, Judezmo
(also called Ladino), Yiddish,
Russian, and other languages
of the Jewish diaspora as the
spoken language of the
majority of the Jewish people
living in Israel.
Modern Hebrew became an
official language in British
Palestine in 1921, and the
primary official language of
the State of Israel, (Arabic
maintained its official
language status). The Hebrew
name for the language is עברית,
or Ivrit (pronounced /iv'rit/
in the IPA).
History
While the term "Hebrew" as a
nationality is customarily
used to refer to the ancient
Israelites, the classical
Hebrew language was extremely
similar to the Canaanite
languages spoken by their
neighbors, such as Phoenician;
indeed, Moabite and Hebrew are
often considered to be two
dialects of the same language.
Hebrew strongly resembles
Aramaic and to a lesser extent
South-Central Arabic, sharing
many linguistic features with
them. |
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Early history
Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic
language. This language family
is generally thought by
linguists to have originated
somewhere in northeastern
Africa, and began to diverge
around the 8th millennium BCE,
although there is much debate
about the exact date and
place. (The theory is espoused
by most archeologists and
linguists, but at odds with
traditional reading of the
Torah.) One branch of this
family, Semitic, eventually
reached the Middle East; it
gradually differentiated into
a variety of related
languages.
By the end of the 3rd
millennium BCE the ancestral
languages of Aramaic, Ugaritic,
and other various Canaanite
languages were spoken in the
Levant alongside the
influential dialects of Ebla
and Akkad. As the Hebrew
founders from northern Haran
filtered south into and came
under the influence of the
Levant, like many sojourners
into Canaan including the
Philistines, they adopted
Canaanite dialects. The first
written evidence of
distinctive Hebrew, the Gezer
calendar, dates back to the
10th century BCE, the
traditional time of the reign
of David and Solomon. It
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 more
modern spelling requires it
(see below).
The Shebna lintel, from the
tomb of a royal steward found
in Siloam, dates to the 7th
century BCE.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 the
hieroglyphs of the Egyptian
writing, 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 Old Hebrew include
the ostraka found near Lachish
which describe events
preceding the final capture of
Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar
and the Babylonian captivity
of 586
BCE.
The most famous work
originally written in Hebrew
is the Hebrew Bible, though
the time at which it was
written is a matter of dispute
(see dating the Bible for
details). The earliest extant
copies were found among the
Dead Sea Scrolls, written
between the 2nd century BCE
and the 1st century CE.
The formal language of the
Babylonian Empire was Aramaic
(its name is either derived
from "Aram Naharayim", Upper
Mesopotamia, or from "Aram,"
the ancient name for Syria).
The Persian Empire, which had
captured Babylonia a few
decades later under Cyrus,
adopted Aramaic as the
official language. Aramaic is
also a North-West Semitic
language, quite similar to
Hebrew. Aramaic has
contributed many words and
expressions to Hebrew, mainly
as the
language of commentary in the
Talmud and other religious
works.
In addition to numerous words
and expressions, Hebrew also
borrowed the Aramaic writing
system. Although the original
Aramaic letter forms were
derived from the same
Phoenician alphabet that was
used in ancient Israel, they
had changed significantly,
both in the hands of the
Mesopotamians and of the Jews,
assuming the forms familiar to
us today around the first
century CE. Writings of that
era (most notably, some of the
Dead Sea Scrolls found in
Qumran) are written in a
script very similar to the
"square" one still used today. |
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Later history
The Jews living in the Persian
Empire adopted Aramaic, and
Hebrew quickly fell into
disuse. It was preserved,
however, as the literary
language of Bible study.
Aramaic became the vernacular
language of the renewed Judaea
for the following 700 years.
Famous works written in
Aramaic include the Targum,
the Talmud and several of
Flavius Josephus' books
(several of the latter were
not preserved, however, in the
original.) Following the
destruction of Jerusalem and
the Second Temple in 70 CE,
the Jews gradually began to
disperse from Judaea into
foreign countries (this
dispersion was hastened when
the Romans destroyed Jerusalem
(and turned it into a pagan
city named Aelia Capitolina)
in 135 CE after putting down
Bar Kokhba's revolt.) For many
hundreds of years Aramaic
remained the spoken language
of Mesopotamian Jews, and
Lishana Deni, one of several
Judæo-Aramaic languages, is a
modern descendant that is
still spoken by a few thousand
Jews (and many non-Jews) from
the area known as Kurdistan;
however, it gradually gave way
to Arabic, as it had given way
to other local languages in
the countries to which the
Jews had gone.
Hebrew was not used as a
mother tongue for roughly 1800
years. However the Jews have
always devoted much effort to
maintaining high standards of
literacy among themselves, the
main purpose being to let any
Jew read the Hebrew Bible and
the accompanying religious
works in the original (see
rabbinic literature, Codes of
Jewish law, The Jewish
Bookshelf). It is interesting
to note that the languages
that the Jews adopted from
their adopted nations, namely
Ladino and Yiddish were not
directly connected to Hebrew
(the former being based on
Spanish and Arabic borrowings,
latter being a remote dialect
of Middle High German),
however, both were written
from right to left
using the Hebrew script.
Hebrew was also used as a
language of communication
among Jews from different
countries, particularly for
the purpose of international
trade.
The most important
contribution to preserving
traditional Hebrew
pronunciation in this period
was that of scholars called
Masoretes (from masoret
meaning "tradition"), who from
about the seventh to the tenth
centuries CE devised detailed
markings to indicate vowels,
stress, and cantillation
(recitation methods). The
original Hebrew texts used
only consonants, and later
some consonants were used to
indicate long vowels. By the
time of the Masoretes this
text was too sacred to be
altered, so all their markings
were in the form of pointing
in and around the letters.
Revival
Eliezer Ben-YehudaThe revival
of Hebrew as a mother tongue
was initiated by the efforts
of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
(1858-1922) (אליעזר בן־יהודה).
He joined the Jewish national
movement and in 1881 emigrated
to Eretz Israel, then a
province 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
more modern 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 1904-1905
"Second aliyah" that Hebrew
had caught real momentum in
Ottoman Palestine with the new
and better 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.
While many saw his work as
fanciful or even blasphemous
[1], many soon understood the
need for a common language
amongst Jews of pre-state
Israel 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 exists
today. The results of his and
the Committee's work were
published in a dictionary (The
Complete Dictionary of Ancient
and Modern Hebrew). 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 pre-State
Israel.
Modern Hebrew
Ben-Yehuda based Modern Hebrew
on Biblical Hebrew. Often new
words were coined by applying
unused word-patterns to
existing roots (Biblical
k-t-v, "write," gave rise to
modern Hebrew hikhtiv,
"dictated," and hitkatev,
"corresponded.") When this did
not suffice, the Committee set
out to invent a new word for a
certain concept, it searched
through the Biblical
word-indexes and foreign
dictionaries, particularly
Arabic. While Ben-Yehuda
preferred
Semitic roots to European
ones, the abundance of
European Hebrew speakers led
to the introduction of
numerous foreign words. Other
changes which had taken place
as Hebrew came back to life
were the systematization of
the grammar - the Biblical
syntax was sometimes limited
and ambiguous -- and the
adoption of standard Western
punctuation.
Modern Hebrew shows influences
from Russian (for example, the
Russian suffix -acia is used
in nouns where English has the
suffix -ation); German
(particularly in combination
words like "tapuakh-adama,"
meaning potato (German
Erdapfel , earth-apple), "iton"
(German Zeitung, news-ity,
news-paper) or "dme-shtia,"
meaning tip (German Trinkgeld
, drink-money). English has
been a very strong influence,
both from British influence
during the period of
the Mandate and American
influence in the present day.
Finally, Arabic, being the
language of numerous Mizrahic
and Sephardic Jewish
immigrants from Arab countries
as well as of the Palestinians
and Israeli Arabs, has also
had an important influence on
Hebrew, especially in slang
(for example, "sababa",
meaning "excellent", or "yalla",
meaning "come on.")
Modern Hebrew is printed with
a script known as "square". It
is the same script, ultimately
derived from Aramaic, that was
used for copying of Bible
books in Hebrew for two
thousand years. This script
also has a cursive version,
which is used for handwriting.
Hebrew has been the language
of numerous poets, which
include Rachel, Hayim Nahman
Bialik, Shaul Tchernihovsky,
Lea Goldberg, Avraham Shlonsky
and Natan Alterman. Hebrew was
also the language of hundreds
of authors, one of whom is the
Nobel Prize laureate Shmuel
Yosef Agnon.
Dialects
According to Ethnologue,
dialects of Hebrew include
Standard Hebrew (General
Israeli, Europeanized Hebrew),
Oriental Hebrew (Arabized
Hebrew, Yemenite Hebrew).
In practice, there is also
Ashkenazi Hebrew, still widely
used in Ashkenazi Jewish
religious services and studies
in Israel and abroad. It was
influenced by the Yiddish
language.
Sephardi Hebrew language is
the basis of Standard Hebrew
and not all that different
from it, although
traditionally it has had a
greater range of phonemes. It
was influenced by the Ladino
language.
Mizrahi (Oriental) Hebrew is
actually a collection of
dialects (including Yemenite)
spoken liturgically by Jews in
various parts of the Arab and
Islamic world. It was
influenced by the Arabic
language.
Nearly every immigrant to
Israel is 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
Ashkenazic consonant
sounds—its recurring feature
being simplification of
differences among a wide array
of pronunciations. This
simplifying tendency also
accounts for the collapse of
the Ashkenazic /t/ and /s/
pronunciations of unaspirated
and aspirated ת into the
single phoneme /t/. Most
Sephardic dialects
differentiated
between these two
pronunciations as /t/ and /θ/.
Within Israel, the
pronunciation of "Standard
Hebrew", however, more often
reflects the national or
ethnic origin of the
individual speaker, rather
than the specific
recommendations of the
Academy. For this reason, over
half the population pronounces
ר as /ʀ/, (a uvular trill, as
in Yiddish and some varieties
of German) or as /ʁ/ (a uvular
fricative, as in French or
many varieties of German),
rather than as /r/, an apical
trill, as in Spanish. The
pronunciation of this phoneme
is often used as a determinant
among Israelis
when ascertaining the national
origin of perceived
foreigners.
Languages strongly
influenced by Hebrew
Yiddish, Ladino, Karaim, and
Judæo-Arabic were all highly
influenced by Hebrew. Although
none are completely derived
from Hebrew, they all make
extensive use of Hebrew
loanwords.
Hebrew has two kinds of
stress: on the last syllable (milra‘)
and on the penultimate
syllable (the one preceding
the last, mil'el). The former
is more frequent. Specific
rules connect the location of
the stress with the length of
the vowels in the last
syllable; however due to the
fact that Modern Hebrew does
not distinguish between long
and short vowels, these rules
are often ignored in everyday
speech. Interestingly enough,
the rules that specify the
vowel length are different for
verbs and nouns, which
influences the stress; thus
the mil‘el-stressed ókhel
(="food") and milra' -stressed
okhèl (="eats", masculine) are
written in the same way.
Little ambiguity exists,
however, due to nouns and
verbs having incompatible
roles in normal sentences.
This is, however, also true in
English, in, for example, the
English word "conduct," in its
nominal and verbal forms.
Vowels
The Hebrew word for vowels is
tnu'ot. Modern Israeli Hebrew
has 5 vowel phonemes:
/a/ (as in "car")
/e/ (as in "set")
/i/ (as in "beak")
/o/ (as in "horn")
/u/ (as in "soup")
In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel
had three forms: short, long
and interrupted (hataf).
However, there is no audible
distinction between the three
in modern Israeli Hebrew.
Hebrew phonetics include a
special feature called schwa.
There are two kinds of schwa:
resting (nax) and moving (na'
). The resting schwa is
pronounced as a brief stop of
speech. The moving schwa
sounds much like the English
"uh".
Hebrew also has dagesh, a
strengthening. There are two
kinds of strengthenings: light
(qal, known also as dagesh
lene) and heavy (xazaq or
dagesh fortis). There are two
sub-categories of the heavy
dagesh: structural heavy (hazaq
tavniti) and complementing
heavy (hazaq mashlim). The
light affects the phonemes /b/
/k/ /p/ 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. Interestingly
enough, historical evidence
indicates that /g/, /d/ and
/t/ used to have strengthened
versions of their own, however
they had disappeared from
virtually all the spoken
dialects of Hebrew. All other
consonants except gutturals
may receive the heavy
emphasis, as well.
One-letter words are always
attached to the following
word. Such words include: the
definite article h (="the");
prepositions b (="in"), m
(="from"), l (="to");
conjunctions sh (="that"), k
(="as", "like"), v (="and").
The vowel that follows the
letter thus attached depends
in general on the beginning of
the next word and the presence
of a definite article which
may be swallowed by the
one-letter word.
The rules for the prepositions
are complicated and vary with
the formality of speech. In
most cases they are followed
by a moving schwa, and for
that reason they are
pronounced as be, me and le.
In more formal speech, if a
preposition is put before a
word which begins with a
moving schwa, then the
preposition takes the vowel /i/
(and the initial consonant is
weakened), but in colloquial
speech these changes do not
occur. For example, colloquial
be
-kfar (="in a village")
becomes bi-khfar. If l or b
are followed by the definite
article ha, their vowel
changes to /a/. Thus *be-ha-matos
becomes ba-matos (="in the
plane"). However it does not
happen to m, therefore me-ha-
matos is a valid form, which
means "from the plane".
* indicates that the given
example is not grammatically
correct
Consonants
The Hebrew word for consonants
is ‘itsurim (עיצורים).
/ע/ was once pronounced as a
voiced pharyngeal fricative.
Modern Ashkenazi (European,
except Dutch) reading
tradition ignores this;
however Sephardic
(North-African) Jews and
Israeli Arabs accent these
phonemes, in a fashion which
resembles Arabic `ain ع.
Georgian Jews pronounce it as
a glottalized g. Western
European Sephardim and Dutch
Ashkenazim traditionally
pronounce it as "ng" in "sing"
— a pronunciation which can
also be found in the Italki
tradition and, historically,
in south-west Germany.
Note 1: Postalveolar sounds
(with the exception of /ʃ/)
are not native to Hebrew, and
only found in borrowings.
Note 2: The pairs (/b/, /v/),
(/k/, /x/), (/p/, /f/),
written respectively by the
letters bet (ב), kaf (כ) and
pe (פ)
have historically been
allophonic. In Modern Hebrew,
however, all six sounds are
phonemic, due to mergers
involving
formerly distinct sounds (/v/
merging with /w/, /k/ merging
with /q/, /x/ merging with
/ħ/), 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/ through
foreign borrowings.
Historical sound changes
Standard (non-Oriental)
Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has
undergone a number of splits
and mergers in its development
from
Biblical Hebrew [2].
BH /b/ had two allophones, [b]
and [v]; the [v] allophone has
merged with /w/ into SIH /v/
BH /k/ had two allophones, [k]
and [x]; the [k] allophone has
merged with /q/ into SIH /k/,
while the [x] allophone
has merged with /ḥ/ into SIH
/x/
BH /t/ and /ṭ/ have merged
into SIH /t/
BH /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ have merged
into SIH /ʔ/
BH /p/ had two allophones, [p]
and [f]; the incorporation of
loanwords into Modern Hebrew
has probably resulted in
a split, so that /p/ and /f/
are separate phonemes
Grammar
See main article Hebrew
grammar
Hebrew grammar is mostly
analytical, expressing such
forms as dative, ablative, and
accusative using prepositional
particles rather than
grammatical cases. However
inflection does play an
important role in the
formation of the
verbs, nouns and the genitive
construct, which is called "smikhut".
Words in smikhut are often
combined with
hyphens.
Writing system
Modern Hebrew is written from
right to left using the Hebrew
alphabet. Modern scripts are
based on the "square"
letter form. A similar system
is used in handwriting, but
the letters tend to be more
circular in their character,
and
sometimes vary markedly from
their printed equivalents.
Biblical Hebrew text contains
nothing but consonants and
spaces, and most modern Hebrew
texts contain only consonants,
spaces and western-style
punctuation. A pointing
system (nikud, from the root
word meaning "points" or
"dots") developed around the
5th Century C.E. is used to
indicate vowels and syllabic
stresses in some religious
books, and is almost always
found in modern poetry,
children's literature, and
texts for beginning students
of Hebrew. The system is also
used sparingly 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.
All Hebrew consonant phonemes
are represented by a single
letter. Although a single
letter might represent two
phonemes — the letter "bet,"
for example, represents both
/b/ and /v/ — the two sounds
are always related "hard"
(plosive) and "soft"
(fricative) forms, their
pronunciaton being very often
determined by context. In
fully pointed
texts, the hard form normally
has a dot, known as a dagesh,
in its center.
The letters hei, vav and yud
can represent consonantal
sounds (/h/, /v/ and /y/,
respectively) or serve as a
markers for vowels. In the
latter case, these letters are
called "emot qria" ("matres
lectionis" in Latin, "mothers
of reading" in English). The
letter hei at the end of a
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