Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew, also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only extant Canaanite language, as well as one of the oldest attested languages to be spoken as a native language in the modern day, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an abjad script written from right-to-left. The current standard was codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is predominantly spoken by over 10 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is nearly universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history.
A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew was spoken since antiquity as the vernacular of the Israelites until around the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted by a western dialect of the Aramaic language, the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence, it became extinct as a spoken language.
By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as an everyday language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and a distinct Jewish nationality in the context of Zionism. Soon after, a large number of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers were murdered in the Holocaust or fled to Israel, and many speakers of Judeo-Arabic emigrated to Israel in the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, where many would adapt to Modern Hebrew.
Currently, Hebrew is spoken by over 10 million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers. Over 6.5 million of these speak it as their native language, the overwhelming majority of whom are Jews who were born in Israel. The rest is split: 2 million are immigrants to Israel; 1.5 million are Israeli Arabs, whose first language is usually Arabic; and half a million are expatriate Israelis or diaspora Jews.
Under Israeli law, the organization that officially directs the development of Modern Hebrew is the Academy of the Hebrew Language, headquartered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Name
The most common scholarly term for the language is "Modern Hebrew". Most people refer to it simply as "Hebrew".The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic" as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew. supported the now widely used term "Israeli Hebrew" on the basis that it "represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew". In 1999, Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed the term "Israeli" to represent the multiple origins of the language.
Background
The history of the Hebrew language can be divided into four major periods:- Biblical Hebrew, until about the 3rd century BCE; the language of most of the Hebrew Bible
- Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah and Talmud
- Medieval Hebrew, from about the 6th to the 18th century CE
- Modern Hebrew, from the 19th century to the present, the language of the modern State of Israel
Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile, Hebrew became restricted to liturgical and literary use.
Revival
Hebrew had been spoken at various times and for many purposes throughout the Diaspora. During the Old Yishuv, it had developed into a spoken lingua franca among Palestinian Jews. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda then led a revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue in the late 19th century and early 20th century.Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling and grammar, and Sephardic pronunciation. Its acceptance by the early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was caused primarily by support from the organisations of Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and the official status it received in the 1922 constitution of the British Mandate for Palestine. Ben-Yehuda codified and planned Modern Hebrew using 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries. Many new words were borrowed from Arabic, due to the language's common Semitic roots with Hebrew, but changed to fit Hebrew phonology and grammar, for example the words and are now applied to 'socks', a diminutive of the Arabic . In addition, early Jewish immigrants, borrowing from the local Arabs, and later immigrants from Arab lands introduced many nouns as loanwords from Arabic, as well as much of Modern Hebrew's slang. Despite Ben-Yehuda's fame as the renewer of Hebrew, the most productive renewer of Hebrew words was poet Haim Nahman Bialik.
One of the phenomena seen with the revival of the Hebrew language is that old meanings of nouns were occasionally changed for altogether different meanings, such as bardelas, which in Mishnaic Hebrew meant 'hyena', but in Modern Hebrew it now means 'cheetah'; or shezīf which is now used for 'plum', but formerly meant 'jujube'. The word is now applied to a variety of summer squash, a plant native to the New World. Another example is the word , which now denotes a street or a road, but is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning 'trodden down' or 'blazed', rather than a common noun. It was originally used to describe a blazed trail. The flower Anemone coronaria, called in Modern Hebrew , was formerly called in Hebrew .
Classification
Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family, within the Canaanite branch of the Northwest Semitic subgroup. While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah eras and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax, some scholars posit that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state, though this is not the consensus among scholars.Modern Hebrew is considered to be a koiné language based on historical layers of Hebrew that incorporates foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution. A minority of scholars argue that the revived language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European. These theories are controversial and have not been met with general acceptance, and the consensus among a majority of scholars is that Modern Hebrew, despite its non-Semitic influences, can correctly be classified as a Semitic language. Although Modern Hebrew has more of the features attributed to Standard Average European than Biblical Hebrew, it is still quite distant, and has fewer such features than Modern Standard Arabic.
Alphabet
Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet, which is an abjad, or consonant-only script of 22 letters based on the "square" letter form, known as Ashurit, which was developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive script is used in handwriting. When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letters known as Niqqud, or by use of Matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels. Further diacritics like Dagesh and Sin and Shin dots are used to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the consonants. The letters "", "", "", each modified with a Geresh, represent the consonants,,. The consonant may also be written as "" and "". is represented interchangeably by a simple vav "", non-standard double vav "" and sometimes by non-standard geresh modified vav "".| Name | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Printed letter | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cursive letter | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pronunciation | , | , | ,, | ~ | ,, | , | ~, | , | ~ | , | ||||||||||||
| Transliteration | ', | b, v | g | d | h | v, u, o, w | z | kh, ch, h | t | y, i, e, ei | k, kh | l | m | n | s | ', | p, f | ts, tz | k | r | sh, s | t |