38
For the vowels, pay close attention to the nəquddoth (vowel dots)! Between the shin and the lamedh is a shəwa mark; sometimes this indicates an extra-short vowel, sometimes no vowel at all. But historically, shəwa was always pronounced (shəwa na) if it came after the first consonant in the word. So at the time of the Septuagint, the name was pronounced ...
37
English has been spoken in New York for hundreds of years while Hebrew was only revitalized in the late 19th century. The British Isles are said to have more varieties of English than the rest of the world combined, while English spoken in Australia, for instance, is only beginning to develop geographical variation. What is evident from this is that age ...
28
You’re right that there is very little regional variation in Modern Hebrew accents (though there are a few street market and schoolyard slang differences). Israel is a small, well-connected country with fairly homogeneous media consumption, so this is perhaps not that surprising.
That said, there are certainly ethnolect and sociolect accents. The big ...
25
Did Hebrew replace Yiddish?
I would say the decline of Yiddish and the rise of Hebrew are separate.
Yiddish declined suddenly because of the Holocaust. It arguably would have declined anyway, but it did decline in every country where the surviving Yiddish-speakers ended up - mainly the US and the Soviet Union, where they switched to English and Russian.
...
24
Greek had the /h/ phoneme only at the beginning of a word, and it was marked with a diacritic (rough breathing sign) rather than with a letter. Koine Greek lost the /h/ phoneme and early manuscripts (such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) didn't mark rough breathing, or had it added by a later scribe (according to their respective Wikipedia pages), ...
23
It is because, at least in the later borrowings, Semitic ṭ ט is regularly represented by τ [t], while t ת is represented by θ [th]. It has to do with the fact that the Semitic emphatics are unaspirated, while the plain stops are aspirated.
The fricative pronunciation of Greek θ, and of Aramaic/Hebrew post-vocalic t does not emerge until well into the ...
18
It's just a coincidence.
The Hebrew and Arabic words come from a root B-W-R "to lie fallow"; compare the Arabic verbs بَوَّرَ (bawwara) and بَارَ (baara). The metaphor of "thoughts = crops" isn't an uncommon one, so if someone isn't having any thoughts, their mind is metaphorically lying fallow.
The English word is borrowed from Dutch (...
18
It's an even more complicated story than that! In fact, in the 19th C, there was a strong literary scene of modern novels in Hebrew among European Jews before there was a strong Yiddish literary scene. It still wasn't really spoken until Eliezer ben Yehuda's work in Ottoman Palestine, which was partially based on a marketplace Hebrew that was arising from ...
16
While this is a fair question, I think there are several factors which argue against Modern Hebrew being considered an artificial language:
The degree of mutual intelligibility between the modern language and the ancient language tends to argue that these two are in fact the same language.
The fact that the language, as "constructed", was specifically ...
16
Modern Hebrew is not SAE by any stretch. Going through Haspelmath's criteria:
Definite and indefinite articles: Modern Hebrew (MH) has only a definite article (-ה), which is inherited from Biblical Hebrew (BH)
Relative clauses formed by a relative pronoun: MH's relative clauses are formed by the particle ש- and not by a pronoun (inherited from BH)
"Have"-...
15
Arnaud Fournet's answer is correct: there's no evidence for a relationship. But to add a bit more evidence that there isn't a connection…
The Classical pronunciation of vīvere was something like /wiːwɛrɛ/, while the Biblical pronunciation of אָבִיב was something like /ʔɑːbiːb/. Both words are attested well before the relevant sound changes (W-hardening and ...
14
The Aramaic word שבקתני would probably have been pronounced /ʃabaqtani/. Usually, as you note, the /q/ of Aramaic is transliterated as κ, so σαβακθανι /sabaktʰani/ would be expected. However, in Greek, the cluster χθ was pronounced /ktʰ/, so the spelling σαβαχθανι is only an orthographic convention for the same pronunciation /sabaktʰani/ by putting two ...
13
In his article "Is Modern Hebrew Standard Average European?
The View from European" (in "Linguistic Typology", Volume 17; 2013) Amir Zeldes lists 13 typological features defining SAE. Modern Hebrew (similarly to Biblical Hebrew) exhibits 3 of them.
The article is available here.
13
Modern Hebrew is closer to Biblical Hebrew than modern standard Arabic is, by almost any measure of closeness. Educated modern Hebrew speakers can read Biblical Hebrew, typically better than educated English speakers can read Old English which was written much later than Biblical Hebrew.
Often when I learn a new word in Arabic, I notice that it is ...
13
Also note that most of the growth of Israely Hebrew follows the invention of the radio and telephone. Radio and television are believed to be major harminizors of accents.
12
While there can always be some ambiguity, Hebrew and other Semitic languages have a system of triconsonantal roots, in which each sequence of three consonants suggests the meaning of the word. For example, the root k-t-b, meaning "to write", is used to derive words like kāṯaḇti כתבתי "I wrote", kāṯaḇ כתב "he wrote", kattāḇ כתב "reporter" (m), kəṯāḇ כתב "...
11
They both come from Greek συμφωνία.This was used in ancient and mediaeval times as a name for various musical instruments, including a type of drum.
11
Yes, some people think Akkadian š was pronounced [s].
For the sibilants, traditionally /š/ has been held to be postalveolar [ʃ], and /s/, /z/, /ṣ/ analyzed as fricatives; but attested assimilations in Akkadian suggest otherwise. For example, when the possessive suffix -šu is added to the root awat ('word'), it is written awassu ('his word')
(https://en....
11
In Semitic linguistics it is customary to refer to the "absolute state" and the "construct state", or their Latin equivalents "status absolutus" and "status constructus".
11
Perhaps it is helpful to understand some of the history behind this mixed system.
Originally, Hebrew was never written with niqudot (diacritics added above, below, or within consonantal signs; singular niqud). Although there is a high theoretical ambiguity in such a writing system (e.g. שמר for šāmar 'he guarded', šəmor 'guard!', šomēr '(a) guard') this ...
11
Ananas is not from Hebrew. It is from a South American language, Old Tupi, from the same area where the fruit is native – the Amazon rainforest, not the Middle East. Tupi natives called the fruit naná, and made a fermented drink from it, naná’y. The European invaders took the fruit to the rest of the world and borrowed the word as ananas, as described by ...
10
Hebrew šɛmɛn שמן “oil, fat” is a Semitic cognate of Arabic samn سمن “fat, butter” (with Semitic s1). It is not related to šaḥm شحم “fat, grease” (with Semitic s2 and ḥ) or to the IE words mentioned above.
It is true that šɛmɛn looks superficially like Latin semen, but the vowels of the former are the result of a specifically Hebrew development (Semitic qatl ...
10
Although I haven't heard of the term "degrees of passive/active" before, they are almost certainly talking about the verbal stems. This is a concept indeed alien to Western European (or broader) but common to all Semitic languages. The core idea is that the stems differentiate voice and Aktionsart.
In an earlier stage of the language (pre-1000 BCE) there ...
10
Definitely!
The most common are direct loanwords from one language into another, or Wanderwörter, words that spread over long distances via trade.
For the first category, look at sabbatum, the Latin word for the Jewish day of rest. This is quite definitely borrowed from Hebrew שַׁבָּת (shabbāth), since Latin didn't have a good word for "one day out of ...
9
The present answers are in principle correct, but do not explain the fundamental issues with this idea. In short:
The "God" lexeme is relatively infrequent to develop into a definite article.
Comparative evidence from Ugaritic and Aramaic suggest that the developments must have taken place largely independently, which makes such an unlikely derivation even ...
9
That symbol represents the furtive pataḥ or פתח גנוב - it says so right in the linked document: "The only exception is the pataḥ furtivum as in רוח"
There is no Unicode symbol for it, because it's typically (at least in Modern Hebrew) written identically to the normal pataḥ. However, there are those who think it should be printed further to the right: ("...
9
There are several different standards, so which one you want to use will depend on your goal. For the purpose of conversing on the internet, for example, most people use ch; for linguistic purposes, ḥ is standard; for just using Hebrew words in an English context, just plain h is common.
Anecdotally, I would expect most linguists to understand x (since it's ...
9
This is likely to be an unsatisfying answer, but…
Historical accident. That's just the way it is.
Hebrew imported various punctuation marks from various other languages of Europe fairly early, and kept their forms unchanged (Google points me to a document from 1784). Other RTL languages (e.g. Arabic) imported them later, and reversed some of them to fit ...
8
Persian had used to use a variety of alphabets throughout the time, so I think it would not make any particular difficulty to read in Persian Arabic alphabet as well. The main difficulties are
a) sounds not present in Arabic, yet noticeable in Persian (or other languages using the script), and
b) a richer stock of vowels. These two factors elicit in ...
8
Is there any relation between the Hebrew word שד for 'demon' and the English word 'shade' for ghost?
Probably not.
The etymology of English "shade" (newest to oldest) is something like:
Modern English "shade"
Old English sċeadu (shadow)
Proto-Germanic *skađwaz (shadow)
Proto-Indo-European *sk(e)h₃-tos (darkness)
There's decent evidence for this being a native Indo-European root; while it was most productive in Germanic, it has ...
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