Hebrew

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
We will control
what you think with

Language

Icon language.svg
Here's how we do it
Hebrew is a Semitic language originally spoken in the regions now known as Israel and Jordan, and the primary language of the Jewish Bible and the Talmud. It is a member of the Canaanite branch of the West Semitic language and as such is closely related to Phoenician and Aramaic. Since it passed out of daily use by the first century CE, its original pronunciation is lost to the ages, but its liturgical use by Judaism has led to several competing pronunciations maintained by the Jewish diaspora. Modern Israeli Hebrew speakers consider the pronunciation of the Yemeni version to be the most refined and it is the variant sometimes considered by linguists to be the closest to how the language was spoken in ancient times.

Revived as a living language in the late 19th century, Hebrew is the official language of the state of Israel, where it is the dominant spoken language (although English, Russian and Palestinian Arabic are common as well). It is also considered, along with Latin and Greek, one of the traditional classical languages of Western education. Much like them, it is often considered to have magical properties by virtue of being old and associated with an ancient religious tradition. Practitioners of Kabbalah and other bullshit like to use random Hebrew words as incantations in the mistaken belief that they actually do something. There is also an entire pseudoscience devoted to adding up random number and letter combinations in the Bible and somehow divining meaning from them, known as gematria.

Hebrew is written from right to left, which is good news for lefties but bad news for everyone else.

[edit] Lack of vowels

Before the Masoretes invented the modern system of vowel markings in the 7th-9th centuries CE, written Hebrew had no vowels. The reader was expected to just know the correct pronunciation of the word, given only its consonants were written. This is standard practice for Semitic languages, which tend to have relatively small vowel inventories.

This, coupled with its lack of use as a living language between the 1st and 19th centuries CE, is why the original pronunciation of most Hebrew words is lost to us and must be reconstructed by the comparative method, and part of the reason why the Sacred Tetragrammaton, YHWH, is pronounced "Yahweh" (the scholarly reconstruction) by some and "Jehovah" by others (based on a flawed transliteration into Latin).

[edit] See also

  • Yiddish, an unrelated language also spoken by Jews (but heavily influenced by Hebrew)

[edit] External links

Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support