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Modern Hebrew (, or ), 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 first language in the modern day, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an Abjad 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 Language shift by a western dialect of the Aramaic, 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 language as a spoken language.
By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (formerly Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman) had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as an everyday language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and establish a distinct Jewish nationality and nationalism in the context of Zionism.George Mandel (2026). 041529813X 041529813X Soon after, a large number of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers were murdered in the HolocaustSolomon Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3. or aliyah, 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 Aliyah; 1.5 million are Israeli Arabs, whose first language is usually Levantine Arabic; and half a million are Yerida or Jewish diaspora.
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.
The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic"; quote: The language with which we are concerned in this contribution is also known by the names Contemporary Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, both somewhat problematic terms as they rely on the notion of an unambiguous periodization separating Classical or Biblical Hebrew from the present-day language. We follow instead the now widely-used label coined by Rosén (1955), Israeli Hebrew, to denote the link between the emergence of a Hebrew vernacular and the emergence of an Israeli national identity in Israel/Palestine in the early twentieth century." as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew. (חיים רוזן) 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.Zuckermann, G. (1999), "Review of the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary", International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 325-346
Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during about 1200 to 586 BCE.אברהם בן יוסף ,מבוא לתולדות הלשון העברית (Avraham ben-Yosef, Introduction to the History of the Hebrew Language), page 38, אור-עם, Tel Aviv, 1981. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region.
Hebrew language death 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 Sacred language and literary use.Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel and John Elwolde: "There is general agreement that two main periods of RH (Rabbinical Hebrew) can be distinguished. The first, which lasted until the close of the Tannaitic era (around 200 CE), is characterized by RH as a spoken language gradually developing into a literary medium in which the Mishnah, Tosefta, baraitot and Tannaitic midrashim would be composed. The second stage begins with the Amoraim and sees RH being replaced by Aramaic as the spoken vernacular, surviving only as a literary language. Then it continued to be used in later rabbinic writings until the tenth century in, for example, the Hebrew portions of the two Talmuds and in midrashic and haggadic literature."
Background
The history of the Hebrew language can be divided into four major periods: Hebrew language Encyclopædia Britannica
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
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 , 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., "What would the future of Hebrew have been, had not the British Mandate in 1919 accepted it as one of the three official languages of Palestine, at a time when the number of people speaking Hebrew as an everyday language was less than 20,000?": "In retrospect, Hobsbawm's question should be rephrased, substituting the Rothschild house for the British state and the 1880s for 1919. For by the time the British conquered Palestine, Hebrew had become the everyday language of a small but well-entrenched community." (1922): "English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of 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 (sing.) and (pl.) are now applied to 'socks', a diminutive of the Arabic ('socks'). (2026). 9789655170597, ha-Milon he-ḥadash Ltd.. ISBN 9789655170597Cf. Rabbi Hai Gaon's commentary on Mishnah Kelim 27:6, where rtl=yes () was used formerly for the same, and had the equivalent meaning of the Arabic word ('stockings'; 'socks'). In addition, early Jewish immigrants, borrowing from the local Arabs, and later immigrants from Arab lands introduced many nouns as loanwords from Arabic (such as Mentha, , , , , lubiya, hummus, , , etc.), 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 (rtl=yes, a loanword from ), which in Mishnaic Hebrew meant 'hyena',Maimonides' commentary and Rabbi Ovadiah of Bartenura's commentary on Mishnah Baba Kama 1:4; Rabbi Nathan ben Abraham's Mishnah Commentary, Baba Metzia 7:9, s.v. הפרדלס; Arukh, s.v. ברדלס; Zohar Amar, Flora and Fauna in Maimonides' Teachings, Kefar Darom 2015, pp. 177–178; 228 but in Modern Hebrew it now means 'cheetah'; or shezīf (rtl=yes) which is now used for 'plum', but formerly meant 'jujube'.Zohar Amar, Flora and Fauna in Maimonides' Teachings, Kfar Darom 2015, p. 157, s.v. שזפין , explained to mean 'jujube' ( Ziziphus jujuba); Solomon Sirilio's Commentary of the Jerusalem Talmud, on Kila'im 1:4, s.v. השיזפין, which he explained to mean in Spanish azufaifas ('jujubes'). See also Saul Lieberman, Glossary in Tosephta - based on the Erfurt and Vienna Codices (ed. M.S. Zuckermandel), Jerusalem 1970, s.v. שיזפין (p. LXL), explained in German as meaning Brustbeerbaum ('jujube'). The word (formerly 'cucumbers')Thus explained by Maimonides in his Commentary on Mishnah Kila'im 1:2 and in Mishnah Terumot 2:6. See: Zohar Amar, Flora and Fauna in Maimonides' Teachings, Kefar Darom 2015, pp. 111, 149 (Hebrew) ; Zohar Amar, Agricultural Produce in the Land of Israel in the Middle Ages (Hebrew title: גידולי ארץ-ישראל בימי הביניים), Ben-Zvi Institute: Jerusalem 2000, p. 286 (Hebrew) is now applied to a variety of summer squash ( Cucurbita pepo var. cylindrica), a plant native to the New World. Another example is the word (rtl=yes), 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.Compare Rashi's commentary on Exodus 9:17, where he says the word is translated in Aramaic ('a blazed trail'), the word being only an adjective or descriptive word, but not a common noun as it is used today. It is said that Ze'ev Yavetz (1847–1924) is the one who coined this modern Hebrew word for 'road'. See Haaretz, Contributions made by Ze'ev Yavetz ; Roberto Garvia, Esperanto and its Rivals, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, p. 164 The flower Anemone coronaria, called in Modern Hebrew (rtl=yes), was formerly called in Hebrew ('the king's flower')., s.v. citing Maimonides on Mishnah Kil'ayim 5:8 Matar – Science and Technology On-line, the Common Anemone (in Hebrew)
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.Reshef, Yael. Revival of Hebrew: Grammatical Structure and Lexicon. Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics. (2013). 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.Wexler, Paul, The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past: 1990.Izre'el, Shlomo (2003). "The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew." In: Benjamin H. Hary (ed.), Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew: Towards the Compilation of The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH)", Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, 2003, pp. 85–104.See p. 62 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "A New Vision for 'Israeli Hebrew': Theoretical and Practical Implications of Analysing Israel's Main Language as a Semi-Engineered Semito-European Hybrid Language", Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5 (1), pp. 57–71. 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.Yael Reshef. "The Re-Emergence of Hebrew as a National Language" in Weninger, Stefan, Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet CE Watson, Gábor Takács, Vermondo Brugnatelli, H. Ekkehard Wolff et al. (eds) The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Berlin–Boston (2011). p. 551
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 Ktav Ashuri (Assyrian), which was developed from the Aramaic alphabet. A Cursive Hebrew 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 (e.g. bet/ vet, shin/ sin). 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 "".
Phonology
Modern Hebrew has fewer phonemes than Biblical Hebrew but it has developed its own phonological complexity. Israeli Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants, depending on whether the speaker has pharyngeals. It has 5 to 10 vowels, depending on whether diphthongs and vowels are counted, varying with the speaker and the analysis.
Morphology
Modern Hebrew morphology (formation, structure, and interrelationship of words in a language) is essentially Biblical Hebrew. Modern Hebrew showcases much of the inflectional morphology of the classical upon which it was based. In the formation of new words, all verbs and the majority of nouns and adjectives are formed by the classically Semitic devices of Semitic root ( shoresh) with affixed patterns ( mishkal). Mishnaic attributive patterns are often used to create nouns, and Classical patterns are often used to create adjectives. Blended words are created by merging two bound stems or parts of words.
Syntax
The syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic but also shows the influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed during the revival period and over the past century.
Word order
The word order of Modern Hebrew is predominately SVO (subject–verb–object). Biblical Hebrew was originally VSO (verb–subject–object), but drifted into SVO.Li, Charles N. Mechanisms of Syntactic Change. Austin: U of Texas, 1977. Print. In the modern language, a sentence may correctly be arranged in any order but its meaning might be hard to understand unless אֶת is used. Modern Hebrew maintains classical syntactic properties associated with VSO languages: it is prepositional, rather than postpositional, in marking case and adverbial relations, precede main verbs; main verbs precede their complements, and noun modifiers (, other than the definite article ה- (), and ) follow the head noun; and in genitive case constructions, the possessee noun precedes the possessor. Moreover, Modern Hebrew allows and sometimes requires sentences with a predicate initial.
Sample text
Lexicon
Modern Hebrew has expanded its vocabulary effectively to meet the needs of casual vernacular, of science and technology, of journalism and belles-lettres. According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann:
Loanwords
Modern Hebrew has loanwords from Arabic (both from the local Palestinian dialect and from the dialects of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries), Aramaic language, Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, German language, Polish language, Russian language, English language and other languages. Simultaneously, Israeli Hebrew makes use of words that were originally loanwords from the languages of surrounding nations from ancient times: Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian. Mishnaic Hebrew borrowed many nouns from Aramaic (including Persian words borrowed by Aramaic), as well as from Greek language and to a lesser extent Latin.The Latin "familia", from which English "family" is derived, entered Mishnaic Hebrew – and thence, Modern Hebrew – as "pamalya" (פמליה) meaning "entourage". (The original Latin "familia" referred both to a prominent Roman's family and to his household in general, including the entourage of slaves and freedmen which accompanied him in public – hence, both the English and the Hebrew one are derived from the Latin meaning.) In the Middle Ages, Hebrew made heavy semantic borrowing from Arabic, especially in the fields of science and philosophy. Here are typical examples of Hebrew loanwords:
bye exhaust system pleasure date, history snot the father/ correct garden אֲלַכְסוֹן diagonal Greek language λοξός slope וִילוֹן curtain Latin vēlum veil, curtain shoddy work chaos purpose, goal
(Hebrew word, only pronunciation is Yiddish)snore putty knife rubber carbonated
beverageinflamed wound temple servant צִי Naval fleet Ancient Egyptian ship
See also
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