Hebrew

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He'brew beer with pseudo-Hebrew letters: L'chaim! (!לחיים)

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Hebrew is a Semitic language originally spoken in the regions now known as Israel and Jordan, serving as the primary language of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). As a member of the Canaanite branch of the West Semitic languages, it is closely related to Phoenician and to Aramaic. Since it passed out of daily use by the 1^st century CE, its original pronunciation is lost to the ages, but liturgical use by Judaism has led to several competing pronunciations maintained in the Jewish diaspora. Modern Israeli Hebrew-speakers sometimes regard the pronunciation of the Yemeni version as the most refined, and linguists sometimes consider it the variant closest to how the language was spoken in ancient times.

Revived as a living language in the late 19^th century, Hebrew is the official language of the state of Israel, where it is the dominant spoken language (although English, Russian and Arabic are commonly used as well). Hebrew also ranks, along with Latin and Greek, as 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 bullshit like some kinds of Western esotericism sometimes like to use random Hebrew words or letters like incantations, without necessarily knowing the language, in the mistaken belief that this does something. A form of numerology known as gematria is built around to adding up random number-letter pairings in the Bible (and a similar system for the Quran with Arabic letters) and then trying to divine some deeper meaning from them. While the great rabbis of times past did this more as simply an allegorical thing, there is a kookier modern-day equivalent to it called the Bible code that has gotten media buzz and attention from fundamentalist Christians.

The Hebrew alphabet is an abjad (alphabet of only consonant letters, no vowels) made up of 22 letters: aleph (א), bet (ב), gimel (ג‎), dalet (ד), he (ה), vav (ו), zayin (ז), chet (ח‎), tet (ט‎), yod (י), kaf (כ), lamed (ל), mem (מ), nun (נ), samech (ס), 'ayin (ע), pe (פ), tsadi (צ), qof (ק), resh (ר), shin (ש), tav (ת). The letters have equivalents in other Semitic alphabets like Arabic, and knowing them can also be helpful for reading non-Semitic languages in Hebrew script like Yiddish.

Hebraists write Hebrew from right to left (like Arabic), which is good news for lefties but bad news for everyone else.

Lack of vowels

Hebrew is written with what's called an impure abjad; the writing system mostly does not represent vowels, but it does in some places in words. Before the Masoretes invented the modern system of vowel markings in the 7^th-9^th centuries CE, written Hebrew had no vowels. The reader had to understand what vowels would be present in speech through inference. This is standard practice for Semitic languages, which tend to be abjads and is easier when languages have smaller vowel inventories.

Therefore at first only consonants were written, but over time a practice came about of using some letters as either consonants or as silent stand-ins for vowels in some positions, those being pronounced today as: aleph (א) for any vowel, mostly /a/, /e/ or /o/; he (ה) for any vowel, most often /a/ at the end of a word; vav (ו) for /o/ or /u/; and yod (י) for /e/ or /i/. While better than nothing, these letters are still ambiguous, meaning it's impossible to fully read aloud a Hebrew text without either first knowing the language fluently, or having all the extra vowel diacritics (niqqud) added. This ambiguity has led to a few disputes over how to translate some words of unclear etymology in the Bible.

(Note in modern Hebrew both the letters aleph (א) and 'ayin (ע) are mostly silent and take the sound of the vowel ascribed to them. Historically, however, they did have different consonant sounds in the Biblical era.)

This, coupled with its lack of use as a living language between the 1^st and 19^th centuries CE, is why the original Biblical pronunciation of most Hebrew words was 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).

A series of vowel markings, called nequddot (dots) or niqqud, were eventually developed in the early Middle Ages, so the pronunciation of this era at least has been carefully preserved and is well-understood. Niqqud are more commonly found in prayer books and texts intended for learners or diaspora audiences. However, they are almost never found in Israel, are not written in Torah scrolls, and most other religious documents are not written with niqqud either. (This means many preteens have had to struggle to memorize lengthy Torah portions so they can read them aloud flawlessly during their bar mitzvah ceremony.)

History and Semiticity

Hebrew is a member of the Semitic language family, which includes Arabic, Aramaic, Maltese, Babylonian and Amharic. The Semitic family itself is part of the larger Afro-Asiatic family of languages that includes Egyptian and the Berber languages. Hebrew is more specifically a Canaanite language, which includes Phoenician. Canaanite inscriptions are attested from the 17^th century but specifically Hebrew inscriptions are only attested beginning in the 10^th century. During this time, Hebrew was written in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which is only distantly related to the modern Hebrew alphabet.

After the Babylonian exile, Hebrew was gradually replaced as a daily spoken language by Aramaic and was eventually only used for literary and religious purposes. The old Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was also replaced by the much more well-known modern Hebrew alphabet as well. Hebrew was eventually revived in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as part of the Zionism movement, as a pan-Jewish language that could be spoken as the national language of Israel, which it is today. This makes Hebrew the most successful example of a revived dead language in history, made easier by many Jews already having a decent reading knowledge of it.

Biblical Hebrew's known vocabulary may have been about 8,000 words tops, which is nowhere near enough for a modern usable language. Modern Hebrew solved that problem by adapting biblical era root words to new uses. Furthermore, Modern Hebrew had to incorporate vocabulary for things that didn't exist in the time of classical Hebrew. In some cases they are direct borrowings from English, other European languages, or Arabic. Sometimes a word would be formed as a sort of "loan-translation" (technically called a calque) such as iton for "newspaper" which is derived from et (time) the same way Zeitung is from the German Zeit, or "tapuakh adama" (apple of the Earth) for potato, based on French pomme de terre. Of course, other languages have done similar things and given the global importance of English, English loanwords are quite common in many languages these days. Some loanwords aren't even noticed by native speakers any more — about 40% of the English lexicon is ultimately French/Latin derived, for instance, yet nobody questions the Germanic status of English.

Most Afro-Asiatic languages make use of a noun case known as the Construct State; Hebrew speakers refer to this as smikhut (סמיכות‬ supporting or adjacency). Essentially it is when two nouns could be combined to form a third distinct noun. In Classical Hebrew this could be used to demonstrate possession much like the Genitive Case in Indo-European languages. Modern Hebrew rarely uses the Construct State in this fashion. Instead, Modern Hebrew speakers rely on the preposition shel (של) which is similar to de in Spanish. That's not to say that Construct State is totally eliminated, however. Modern Hebrew will use it but it is more typically found in things such as names or when the two combine into one (e.g. the aforementioned "tapuakh adama") or when there's some other type of qualifier. This transition, however, was actually underway in the later Classical period and shel as a preposition is in more recent parts of the Bible.

Nonetheless, the differences have led some observers to erroneously claim that the grammar arose from attempts by European diaspora communities to fit the grammar of their native languages onto Biblical Hebrew, and hence claim that Modern Hebrew is "not a true Semitic language" but rather a relexified Yiddish (a Germanic language). It's a plausible story, especially considering most of the early Jewish immigrants to Palestine were Ashkenazi Jews, but is historically inaccurate. Modern Hebrew is agreed by all but a few crank linguists to be simply a form of the same Semitic language with some grammatical differences and some inevitable European influences.

The phonology, however, is unquestionably based on European Jewish reading traditions like those of the Ashkenazi Jews, which shows obvious Yiddish influence such as the emphatic consonants that either reduce to the same sound as their non-emphatic equivalents, or become more familiar Germanic sounds (sʼ > t͡s). Still, some changes appear unrelated; for example, in Biblical Hebrew, the sound t changed to the th sound in thick after a vowel. In the Ashkenazi tradition this became s instead of th (e.g. "shabbos"), but in Modern Hebrew this sound change no longer occurs at all. Meanwhile the pronunciation of the vowels is not Ashkenazi but mostly comes from the Sefardi Jewish tradition , making Modern Hebrew more or less a "melting pot" dialect between those of different Jewish communities.

Language of babies and Adam and Eve

Because of its centrality to the Bible, a number of people have ascribed mystical powers to Hebrew. Various people including self-taught linguist Isaac Mozeson have claimed that all the world's languages originated from Hebrew. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II attempted to raise babies without any human contact to see if they would speak Hebrew, apparently without success. James IV of Scotland tried a similar experiment by marooning children on Inchkeith Island in the Firth of Forth; one contemporary report suggested this produced Hebrew-speaking infants, although other (probably more reliable) sources say the children died.

Itamar Ben-Avi, born in 1882, was the first person to grow up with Modern Hebrew as his first language. This is largely due to the fact that his father, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who largely invented modern Hebrew, deliberately isolated him from any other languages growing up and spoke it exclusively at home.

See also

• Yiddish, a Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews
• Sanskrit, which serves as the sacred language of Hinduism

External links

• See the Wikipedia article on Hebrew language.
• Main page of the Hebrew-language version of Wikipedia
• Jacob Richman's list of Hebrew learning resources