Hebrew

Hebrew (‘Ivrit, עִבְרִית ), or ‘Ivrit, is a member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It is the language of the Hebrew Bible and of the Old Testament of the Christians. The core of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, traditionally believed to have been first recorded in the time of Moses 3,300 years ago, is written in Classical Hebrew.

Hebrew began to die out as a spoken language after the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians in 586 BC. Spoken Hebrew was replaced by Aramaic, although it was preserved as the language of religion, learning, and literature. Hebrew was
revived as a spoken language during the late 19th and early 20th century as Modern Hebrew. It replaced Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, and a variety of other languages spoken by Jews who emigrated to Israel.

Status

Hebrew is spoken by about 5 million people in Israel (Ethnologue). This figure includes those who speak it as a a native language and those for whom it is a second language learned to varying degrees of proficiency. It became an official language of British Palestine in 1922. Today, it is the official language of the State of Israel. It is used for official, public and private purposes throughout Israel, wih the exception of the Arab sector, where Arabic is used. Government schools teach in either Hebrew or Arabic, however, Hebrew is a compulsory subject through the tenth grade in all schools, even the Arabic ones. Hebrew is the medium of instruction at the university level as well. It is the language of most newspapers, books, magazines, radio, and television. In addition,Hebrew remains the liturgical language of Jews worldwide. There are other surveys that place the number of Hebrew speakers worldwide at 9 million, but this figure does not indicate what is meant by “speakers”.

Dialects

There are two main dialects of Hebrew.

• The Europeanized dialect is spoken by Ashkenazi Jews of European descent. It is strongly influenced by Yiddish. Today, the Europeanized dialect enjoys greater social prestige and tends to be preferred by most young Israelis.
• The Oriental dialect is spoken by Sephardi Jews whose ancestors came to Israel from Middle Eastern countries. The name “Sephardic” comes from the Hebrew word Sefarad, ‘Spain’. These Jews lived in Spain and Portugal from the Middle Ages until their persecution and mass expulsion from those countries in the last decades of the 15th century when they fled to the Middle East. Oriental Hebrew is strongly influenced by Arabic.
• Although the Academy of the Hebrew Language attempts to establish standards, native speakers of Hebrew who now constitute a majority, have created a variety, Spoken Israeli Hebrew, that has yet to be systematically described and standardized.

Structure

Sound system

Hebrew is unique in that it was resurrected from being a written language to becoming one that is spoken today as a first language by millions of people.

Vowels

Spoken Israeli Hebrew has six vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that differentiate word meaning. The phonemes /e/ and /ə/ have merged in the speech of most Israeli speakers. In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted, however this distinction has been lost in Modern Hebrew. The term “interrupted vowel” refers to a vowel followed by a glottal stop.

/ə/ = sound between syllables in uh-uh

Consonants

Consonants in Biblical Hebrew had several characteristics that are not present in Modern Hebrew, for example:

• gemination, i.e., doubling of consonants;
• spirantization, i.e., pronouncing a stop, as a fricative, e.g., pronouncing /b/ as a /v/;
• pharyngealization, i.e., pronouncing consonants with constricted vocal cords;
• loss of voiceless and voiced pharyngeal consonants, which are present in Arabic, but pronounced as velar stops /k/ and /g/ in in the speech of most Hebrew speakers, with the exception of those who speak the Oriental dialect.

Modern Hebrew has the following consonants:

• /ʔ/ = sound between vowels in uh-uh
• /ʃ/ = sh in shop
• /ʒ / = s in vision
• /tʃ/ = ch in chop
• /dʒ/ = j in jet
• /χ, ʁ / have no equivalents in English
• /j/ = y in yet

Stress

Stress usually falls on the last syllable with a few exceptions when it falls on the penultimate syllable, e.g., in nouns with the vowel scheme eh-eh like in geshem (גשם) ‘rain’ or kesef (כסף) “money or silver’; in words with the suffix -enu, which marks 1st person plural past tense, or when marking possessive in nouns.

Grammar

The grammar of Hebrew is fairly typical of all Semitic languages:

• Many words consist of three consonants separated by vowels. Changes in the vowels or their omission affect word meaning, e.g., the root K-T-V produces katav ‘he wrote’, ktav ‘writing’, katuv ‘written’, and miktava ‘desk’.
• Prefixes and suffixes are added to roots to modify word meaning and express grammatical relations.
• There are significant differences in the grammar of Modern as opposed to Biblical Hebrew. The description below is that of Modern Hebrew.

Nouns, articles, adjectives, and pronouns

• Syntactic functions of nouns in the sentence are represented by prepositions. The subject has no special marking.
• Nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine, e.g., yeled ‘boy’ and yalda ‘girl’.
• There are two numbers: singular and plural. Some nouns also have a dual number for paired objects. Plurals are formed by adding the suffix –im to masculine nouns, e.g., yeled ‘boy’ and yeledim ‘boys’, and –ot to feminine nouns, e.g., mita ‘bed’ and mitot ‘beds’. Nouns may change their internal vowels when they take the plural ending.
• Adjectives agree with nouns in number and gender.
• The definite article ha– is placed both before the adjective and the noun, hence ‘the big camel’ is ha-yeled ha-gadol, literally ‘the boy the big.’
• To express possession, modern Hebrew uses the preposition shel ‘of’, as in ha-dal shel ha-beyt ‘the door of the house’.
• A direct object is marked by the preposition et-, e.g., Adam kara et ha-sefer ‘Adam read the book’.

Verbs

• Hebrew verbs are constructed very differently from verbs in Western European languages. All Hebrew verbs are formed from three- or four-consonant roots that define the basic concept of expressed by the verb. The roots are assigned to one of seven constructions that are called binyan. Most roots can be assigned to to more than one binyan, so that more than one verb can be formed from a typical root. As a result, different verbs share the same basic meaning but differ in voice, valency, aspect, or any combination of these features.
• Each binyan has its own conjugation pattern, and verbs in the same binyan are conjugated similarly.
• Verbs have three tenses: present, past, and future.
• There are two numbers: singular and plural.
• There are three persons: first, second, and third.
• There are two genders: masculine and feminine.
• Verbs in five of the binyanim have an imperative mood and an infinitive, verbs in four of the binyanim have gerunds, and verbs in one of the binyanim have a past participle. Finally, a very small number of fixed expressions include verbs in the jussive mood, basically a third-person imperative. Except for the infinitive and gerund, all these forms are conjugated to reflect the number, person, and gender (masculine or feminine) of its subject.
• In dictionaries, Hebrew verbs are given in the third-person masculine singular past tense form. Compare this to English-language dictionaries that give verbs in the infinitive.

Word order

The usual word order in Modern Hebrew is Subject-Verb-Object, as opposed to Biblical Hebrew where the word order was typically Verb-Subject-Object. Modifiers follow the nouns they modify.

color=”#222222″]Vocabulary[/heading]
Most of the basic vocabulary of Modern Hebrew comes from the Bible and the Talmud. Since Hebrew was not spoken for many centuries, it lacked many words needed to deal with the modern world, so many new lexical items had to be added to the vocabulary. Some words were created from existing roots, the meaning of existing words was expanded to deal with new concepts, and a large number of words were borrowed from other languages, such as Arabic, German, Yiddish, Russian, and other European languages.

Below are some basic Hebrew words and phrases.

Below are Hebrew numerals 1-10. They are marked for gender, e.g., shney yeladim ‘two boys’, shtey yeladot ‘two girls’.

Writing

When the Hebrews started using the Aramaic script for everyday use, reserving the Old Hebrew script for religious use only, the Aramaic script quickly became known as the Jewish script. Because of the shape of the letters, it was called the square script. The earliest preserved texts in the square script date back to the 5th century BC.

• The Hebrew alphabet, or alephbet ’ivri, is a consonant-based syllabic writing system which consists of 22 consonants, five of which have a special word-final form.
• Long vowels can be indicated by the letters alef, vav, and yod. Such texts are called vowelled or vocalized. Short vowels are not usually marked by diacritics, except in the Bible, poetry and books for children and textbooks for foreigners.
• Hebrew letters are not connected to each other, even in handwriting.
• Letters have only one case.
• Hebrew is written from right to left.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Hebrew.

Did You Know?

English has a number of words of Hebrew origin, among them many biblical terms. A few of the loanwords are listed below:

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
The revival of Hebrew is intimately associated with the name of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was born in Russia and who came in 1881 to Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, with plans to revive the Hebrew language. Ben-Yehuda wanted the Jews in Palestine to speak Hebrew exclusively. He settled in Jerusalem, planning to use it as the base for spreading his revivalist ideas throughout Palestine and the Diaspora. His plan was to make Hebrew the language of the home and of education, and to expand the Hebrew vocabulary to meet the demands of the Israeli society. He understood that if children could learn Hebrew from a young age in school, they would become proficient in it when they grew up. In this way, Hebrew would become a living language. And so it did.

Difficulty