Hebrew (עִבְרִית ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than seven million people in Israel, the West Bank, the United States, and by Jewish communities around the world.
The core of the Tanakh (sometimes referred to as the Hebrew Bible), the Torah (which Christianity and Judaism traditionally hold to have been first recorded in the time of Moses 3,300 years ago), is written in (Biblical) Classical Hebrew. Jews have always called it לשון הקודש Leshon ha-Kodesh ("The Language of Sanctity") as the scriptures written in this language were considered sacred. Most scholars agree that after the first destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonians in 586 BCE, the kind of Hebrew prevalent in the Tanakh was replaced in daily use by Mishnaic Hebrew and a local version of Aramaic. After the depletion of the Jewish population of parts of Roman occupied Judea, it is believed that Hebrew gradually ceased to be a spoken language roughly around 200 CE, but remained a major written language throughout the centuries. Not only religious, but texts for a large variety of purposes: letters and contracts, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry, protocols of courts—all resorted to Hebrew, which thus adapted itself to various new fields and terminologies by borrowings and new inventions.
Hebrew was revitalized as a spoken language during the late 19th and early 20th century as Modern Hebrew, replacing a score of languages spoken by the Jews at that time, such as Arabic, Ladino (also called Judezmo), Yiddish, Russian, and other languages of the Jewish diaspora as the spoken language of the majority of the Jewish people living in Israel.
Because of its large disuse for centuries, Hebrew lacked many modern words. Several were adapted from the Hebrew Bible or from other languages by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Largely because of this, modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921, and the primary official language of the State of Israel, (Arabic maintained its official language status). The Hebrew name for the language is עברית, or ‘Ivrit (IPA: /ivʲrit/)
History
As a nationality Hebrew refers to the ancient Israelites, but as a language Hebrew refers to one of several dialects of the Canaanite language. Hebrew (Israel) and Moabite (Jordan) can be called Southern Canaanite dialects while Phoenician (Lebanon) can be called a Northern Canaanite dialect. Canaanite is closely related to Aramaic and to a lesser extent South-Central Arabic. Whereas other Canaanite dialects have gone extinct, Hebrew continued and evolved.
Origins of Hebrew
Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language. This language family is generally thought by linguists to have originated somewhere in northeastern Africa, and began to diverge around the 8th millennium BCE, although there is much debate about the exact date and place. One branch of this family, Semitic, eventually reached the Middle East; it gradually differentiated into a variety of related languages.
By the end of the 3rd millennium BCE the ancestral languages of Aramaic, Ugaritic, and other various Canaanite languages were spoken in the Levant alongside the influential dialects of Ebla and Akkad. As the Hebrew founders from northern Haran filtered south into and came under the influence of the Levant, like many sojourners into Canaan including the Philistines, they adopted Canaanite dialects.
Hebrew as a distinct Canaanite dialect
The first written evidence of distinctive Hebrew, the Gezer calendar, dates back to the10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. Classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks and Etruscans later became the Roman script. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where more later Hebrew spelling requires it.
The
Shebna lintel, from the tomb of a royal steward found in
Siloam, dates to the 7th century BCE.
Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example Protosinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian writing, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from Egyptian. One ancient document is the famous Moabite Stone written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam Inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Archaic Hebrew include the ostraka found near Lachish which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE.
Classical Biblical Hebrew
In its widest sense, Classical Hebrew means the spoken language of the ancient land of Israel flourishing between the 10th century BCE and the 4th century CE (!). [3] It comprises several evolving and overlapping dialects. The phases of Classical Hebrew are often named after important literary works associated with them.
- Archaic Biblical Hebrew from the 10th to the 6th century BCE, corresponding to the Monarchic Period until the Babylonian Exile and represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), notably the Song of Moses (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). Also called Old Hebrew.
- Biblical Hebrew around the 6th century, corresponding to the Babylonian Exile and represented by the bulk of the Hebrew Bible that attains much of its present form around this time, give-or-take. Also called Classical Biblical Hebrew (or Classical Hebrew in the narrowest sense).
- Late Biblical Hebrew from the 6th to the 4th century BCE, that corresponds to the Persian Period and is represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible, notably the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
- Qumran Hebrew from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, corresponding to the Hellenistic and Roman Periods before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and represented by the Qumran Scrolls that form most (but not all) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Also called Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew (DSS).
- Mishnaic Hebrew from the 1st to the 3rd century CE, corresponding to the Roman Period after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and represented by the bulk of the Mishnah and Tosefta within the Talmud. Also called Tannaitic Hebrew or Early Rabbinic Hebrew (RH1).
Sometimes the above phases of spoken Classical Hebrew simplify into "Biblical Hebrew" (including several dialects from the tenth century BCE to 2nd century BCE and extant in certain Qumran scrolls) and "Mishnaic Hebrew" (including several dialects from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE and extant in certain other Qumran scrolls as well as non-Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls from the Bar Kokhba War in 2nd century CE).[1] However today, most Hebrew linguists classify Qumran Hebrew as a set of dialects evolving out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew, thus including elements from both but remaining distinct from either.[2] By the start of the Byzantine Period in the 4th century CE, Classical Hebrew ceases as a spoken language, roughly a century after the publication of the Mishnah, apparently declining since the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba War around 135 CE.
Amoraic Hebrew
The term Rabbinic Hebrew generally refers to the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud, besides the quotes from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects organize into Mishnaic Hebrew (also called Tannaitic Hebrew or Early Rabbinic Hebrew) and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew).
The ealier section of the Talmud is the Mishnah that was published around around 200 CE and was written in the earlier Mishnaic dialect. The Talmud also adds the Tosefta being other texts from this dialect. Mishnaic Hebrew also survives in certain Dead Sea Scrolls and is considered one of the dialects of Classical Hebrew, which was the living language in the land of Israel (see above).
About a century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew fell into disuse as a spoken language. The later section of the Talmud, the Gemara, generally comments on the Mishnah and Tosefta in Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a [liturgical language|liturgical]] and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which sometimes occurs in the text of the Gemara.
Medieval Hebrew
After the Talmud, various regional literary dialects of Medieval Hebrew evolve. The most important is Tiberian Hebrew or Masoretic Hebrew, a local dialect of Tiberias in Galilee that becomes the standard for vocalizing the Hebrew Bible and thus influences all other regional dialects of Hebrew. This Tiberian Hebrew from the 7th to 10th century CE is sometimes called "Biblical Hebrew" because it is used to pronounce the Hebrew Bible, however properly it should be distinguished from the historical Biblical Hebrew of the 6th century BCE, whose original pronunciation must be reconstructed.
Tiberian Hebrew incorporates the remarkable scholarship of the Masoretes (from masoret meaning "tradition"), who add vowel points and grammar points to the Hebrew letters to preserve much earlier features of Hebrew, for use in chanting the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretes inherited a biblical text whose letters were considered too sacred to be altered, so their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters. Elsewhere, the earliest appearance of vowel points appears to be the Estranglo script by the 5th century belonging to Western Syriac Aramaic, a Christian dialect of the Eastern branch of Middle Aramaic. This script inspired similar vowel points in the Arabic script a few centuries later and likely Tiberian Hebrew too by the 8th century.
The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages. The Hebrew was also used as a language of communication among Jews from different countries, particularly for the purpose of international trade.
New Hebrew
In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary Hebrew tradition as pronounced in Jerusalem revived as the spoken language of modern Israel, called variously New Hebrew, Israeli Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, and so on. New Hebrew exibits many features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms and borrows (often technical) terms from European languages and (often colloquial) terms from Arabic to function as a modern language.
The revival of Hebrew as a mother tongue was initiated by the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) (אליעזר בן־יהודה). He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 emigrated to Eretz Israel, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora "shtetl" lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language.
However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by more modern grammar and style, in the writings of people like Achad Ha-Am and others. His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into a gradually accepted movement. It was not, however, until the 1904-1905 "Second aliyah" that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the new and better organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants. When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country's three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion.
While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous[4], many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of pre-state Israel who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. Later it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an organization that exists today. The results of his and the Committee's work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew). Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British pre-State Israel.
Hebrew language in the USSR
Main articles: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union and Yevsektsiya
The Soviet authorities considered Hebrew a "reactionary language" since it was associated with both Judaism and Zionism, and it was officially banned by the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education) as early as 1919. Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries. Despite numerous protests in the West[5], teachers and students who attempted to study Hebrew language were pilloried and sentenced for "counter revolutionary" and later for "anti-Soviet" activities.
Hebrew coexisting with Aramaic
Aramaic is a North-West Semitic language, like Canaanite. Its name derives either from "Aram Naharayim" in Upper Mesopotamia or from "Aram", an ancient name for Syria. Various dialects of Aramaic have coexisted with and influenced the evolution of Hebrew throughout much of its history.
Aramaic as the international language of the Mideast
The language of the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nebukhadrezzar was a dialect of Aramaic. The Persian Empire under Cyrus, who captured Babylonia a few decades later, adopted Aramaic as the official international language of the Persian Empire. At the end of the 6th century, Cyrus allowed the Israelite population, who had been exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem and its surrounding region of Judah, to return to Jerusalem to estabilish a Persian province, usually called Judea. Thus Aramaic became the international administrative language when dealing with the rest of Persian Empire.
Even while the texts of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible are crystalizing, Aramaic began to function as a coexisting language. The priestly scribes of Jerusalem put asside the Canaanite script of Archaic Biblical Hebrew and instead borrowed the Aramaic script from Babylon in order to write the books of the Hebrew Bible. Although the Aramaic alphabet derived from the same Canaanite alphabet that Archaic Hebrew did, they evolved in significantly different manners. By the 1st century CE, the borrowed Aramaic script (or the so-called "Syrian" script) developed into the distinctive Hebrew square script, extant in the Dead Sea Scrolls whose letter forms resemble the Hebrew script still in use today.
Initially, the Torah functioned as a kind of constitution for the new provincial government of Judea, consolidating and updating ancient ethnic laws and incorporating traditional narratives as a kind of preamble to explain the context of these administrative laws. Although the original Aramaic letter forms were derived from the same Phoenician alphabet that was used in ancient Israel, they had changed significantly, both in the hands of the Mesopotamians and of the Jews, assuming the forms familiar to us today around the first century CE. Writings of that era (most notably, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Qumran) are written in a script very similar to the "square" one still used today.
Aramaic displacing Hebrew as a spoken language
Modern scholars, by the early half of the 20th century, reached a nearly unanimous opinion that Aramaic became a spoken language in Judea by the start of the Hellenistic Period in the 4th century BCE, and around the same time Hebrew ceased to function as a spoken language. However during the latter half of the 20th century, accumulating archeological evidence and especially linguistic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls has qualified the previous consensus. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew to flourished as a living spoken language. Hebrew did not cease to be the spoken language of the land of Israel until just before the Byzantine Period.
The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for greater Judea, which includes all the land of Israel. Hebrew functioned as the local mother tongue of Judea, Aramaic functioned as the international language for the rest of the Mideast, and eventually Greek functioned as another international language for the eastern areas of the Roman Empire. Communities of Jews (and non-Jews), who immigrated to Judea from these other lands and who continued to speak Aramaic or Greek, are known.
Although the survival of Hebrew as a spoken language until the Byzantine Period is well-known among Hebrew linguists, there remains a lag in awareness among some historians who do not necessarily keep up-to-speed with linguistic research and who rely on outdated scholarship. Nevertheless, awareness of the vigor of Hebrew is slowly but surely making its way through the recent academic literature.[3][6]
The international language of Aramaic radiated into various regional dialects. In the vicinity of greater Judea, various dialects of Late Old Western Aramaic emerged, including the Jewish dialect of Old Judean Aramaic. Josephus Flavius initially wrote and published his books in Old Judean Aramaic but later translated and published them in Koine Greek for the Roman imperial court.
Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Jews gradually began to disperse from Jerusalem to foreign countries, especially after the Bar Kokhba War in 135 CE when the Romans turned Jerusalem into a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina.
After the Bar Kokhba War in the 2nd century CE, the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic dialect emerged from obscurity out of the vicinity of Galilee to form one of the main dialects in the Western branch of Middle Aramaic. The Jerusalem Talmud (by the 5th century) used this Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, as did the Midrash Rabba (6th to 12th century). This dialect probably influenced the pronunciation of the 8th-century Tiberian Hebrew that vocalizes the Hebrew Bible.
Meanwhile over in Babylon, the Babylonian Talmud (by the 7th century) used Jewish Middle Babylonian Aramaic, a Jewish dialect in the Eastern branch of Middle Aramaic. For centuries Jewish Babylonian remained the spoken language of Mesopotamian Jews and the Lishana Deni. In the area of Kurdistan, there is a modern Aramaic dialect descending from it that is still spoken by a few thousand Jews (and non-Jews), though it has largely given way to Arabic.
Hebrew strongly influenced these various Jewish dialects of Aramaic throughout their histories.
Regional Hebrew dialects
According to Ethnologue, dialects of Hebrew include Standard Hebrew (General Israeli, Europeanized Hebrew), Oriental Hebrew (Arabized Hebrew, Yemenite Hebrew).
In practice, there is also Ashkenazi Hebrew, still widely used in Ashkenazi Jewish religious services and studies in Israel and abroad. It was influenced by the Yiddish language.
Sephardi Hebrew is the basis of Standard Hebrew and not all that different from it, although traditionally it has had a greater range of phonemes. It was influenced by the Ladino language.
Mizrahi (Oriental) Hebrew is actually a collection of dialects (including Yemenite) spoken liturgically by Jews in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world. It was possibly influenced by the Arabic language, although some linguists maintain that it is the direct heir of Biblical Hebrew, and thus represents the true dialect of Hebrew.
Nearly every immigrant to Israel is encouraged to adopt Standard Hebrew as their daily language. Phonologically, this "dialect" may most accurately be described as an amalgam of pronunciations preserving Sephardic vowel sounds and Ashkenazic consonant sounds with Yiddish-style influence—its recurring feature being simplification of differences among a wide array of pronunciations. This simplifying tendency also accounts for the collapse of the Ashkenazic /t/ and /s/ pronunciations of unaspirated and aspirated ת into the single phoneme /t/. Most Sephardic dialects differentiated between these two pronunciations as /t/ and /θ/. Within Israel, the pronunciation of "Standard Hebrew", however, more often reflects the diasporic origin of the individual speaker, rather than the specific recommendations of the Academy. For this reason, over half the population pronounces ר as [ʀ], (a uvular trill, as in Yiddish and some varieties of German) or as [ʁ] (a uvular fricative, as in French or many varieties of German), rather than as [r], an apical trill, as in Spanish. The pronunciation of this phoneme is often used among Israelis as a shibboleth, or determinant when ascertaining the national origin of perceived foreigners.
Languages strongly influenced by Hebrew
See main article Jewish languages
Besides Jewish dialects of Aramaic, other languages are highly influenced by Hebrew, such as Yiddish, Ladino, Karaim and Judeo-Arabic. Although none is completely derived from Hebrew, they all make extensive use of Hebrew loanwords.
In a less direct manner, the revival of Hebrew is often cited by proponents of International auxiliary languages as the best proof that languages long dead, with small communities, or modified or created artificially can become living languages used by a large number of people.
Sounds
Hebrew has two kinds of stress: on the last syllable (milra‘) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, mil‘el). The former is more frequent. Specific rules connect the location of the stress with the length of the vowels in the last syllable; however due to the fact that Modern Hebrew does not distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are often ignored in everyday speech. Interestingly enough, the rules that specify the vowel length are different for verbs and nouns, which influences the stress; thus the mil‘el-stressed ókhel (="food") and milra‘-stressed okhèl (="eats", masculine) are written in the same way. Little ambiguity exists, however, due to nouns and verbs having incompatible roles in normal sentences. This is, however, also true in English, in, for example, the English word "conduct," in its nominal and verbal forms.
Vowels
The Hebrew word for vowels is tnu‘ot. The marks for these vowels are called Niqqud. Modern Israeli Hebrew has 5 vowel phonemes:
- /a/ (as in "car") - The vowels qamatz and patakh
- /e/ (as in "set") - The vowels seggol and tzereh
- /i/ (as in "beak") - The vowel khiriq
- /o/ (as in "horn") - The vowel kholam
- /u/ (as in "room") - The vowels shuruq and qubbutz
In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (hataf). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew.
Hebrew phonetics include a special feature called shva (schwa). According to "Ha-Yesod, the Fundamentals of Hebrew" by Luba Uveeler and Norman M. Broznick, this feature is pronounced "Shva" and is spelled Shin Vav He. There are two kinds of shva: resting (nax) and moving (na' ). The resting shva is pronounced as a brief stop of speech. The moving shva sounds much like the English a in about.
Hebrew also has dagesh, a strengthening. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (qal, known also as dagesh lene) and heavy (hazaq or dagesh forte). There are two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh: structural heavy (hazaq tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazaq mashlim). The light affects the phonemes /b/ /k/ /p/ in the beginning of a word, or after a resting schwa. Structural heavy emphases belong to certain vowel patterns (mishkalim and binyanim; see the section on grammar below), and correspond originally to doubled consonants. Complementing strengthening is added when vowel assimilation takes place. As mentioned before, the emphasis influences which of a pair of (former) allophones is pronounced. Interestingly enough, historical evidence indicates that /g/, /d/ and /t/ used to have strengthened versions of their own, however they had disappeared from virtually all the spoken dialects of Hebrew. All other consonants except gutturals may receive the heavy emphasis, as well.
One-letter words are always attached to the following word. Such words include: the definite article h (="the"); prepositions b (="in"), m (="from"), l (="to"); conjunctions sh (="that"), k (="as", "like"), v (="and"). The vowel that follows the letter thus attached depends in general on the beginning of the next word and the presence of a definite article which may be swallowed by the one-letter word.
The rules for the prepositions are complicated and vary with the formality of speech. In most cases they are followed by a moving schwa, and for that reason they are pronounced as be, me and le. In more formal speech, if a preposition is put before a word which begins with a moving schwa, then the preposition takes the vowel /i/ (and the initial consonant is weakened), but in colloquial speech these changes do not occur. For example, colloquial be-kfar (="in a village") becomes bi-khfar. If l or b are followed by the definite article ha, their vowel changes to /a/. Thus *be-ha-matos becomes ba-matos (="in the plane"). However it does not happen to m, therefore me-ha-matos is a valid form, which means "from the plane".
- * indicates that the given example is not grammatically correct
Consonants
The Hebrew word for consonants is ‘itsurim (עיצורים).
ע was once pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. Modern Ashkenazi (Northern and Eastern European Jews) reading tradition ignores this; however, Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African Jews) and Israeli Arabs accent these phonemes in a traditional semitic fashion which resembles Arabic `ain ع. Georgian Jews pronounce it as a glottalized g. Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it [ŋ] (like ng in sing) — a pronunciation which can also be found in the Italki tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany.
Note 1: Postalveolar sounds (with the exception of /ʃ/) are not native to Hebrew, and only found in borrowings.
Note 2: The pairs (/b/, /v/), (/k/, /x/), (/p/, /f/), written respectively by the letters bet (ב), kaf (כ) and pe (פ) have historically been allophonic. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are phonemic, due to mergers involving formerly distinct sounds (/v/ merging with /w/, /k/ merging with /q/, /x/ merging with /ħ/), loss of consonant gemination (which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic), and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ through foreign borrowings.
Historical sound changes
Standard (non-Oriental) Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has undergone a number of splits and mergers in its development from Biblical Hebrew [7].
- BH /b/ had two allophones, [b] and [v]; the [v] allophone has merged with /w/ into SIH /v/
- BH /k/ had two allophones, [k] and [x]; the [k] allophone has merged with /q/ into SIH /k/, while the [x] allophone has merged with /ḥ/ into SIH /x/
- BH /t/ and /ṭ/ have merged into SIH /t/
- BH /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ have merged into SIH /ʔ/
- BH /p/ had two allophones, [p] and [f]; the incorporation of loanwords into Modern Hebrew has probably resulted in a split, so that /p/ and /f/ are separate phonemes
Grammar
See main article Hebrew grammar
Hebrew grammar is mostly analytical, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than grammatical cases. However inflection does play an important role in the formation of the verbs, nouns and the genitive construct, which is called "smikhut". Words in smikhut are often combined with hyphens.
Writing system
Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet. Modern scripts are based on the "square" letter form. A similar system is used in handwriting, but the letters tend to be more circular in their character, and sometimes vary markedly from their printed equivalents. Biblical Hebrew text contains nothing but consonants and spaces, and most modern Hebrew texts contain only consonants, spaces and western-style punctuation. A pointing system (nikud, from the root word meaning "points" or "dots") developed around the 5th Century C.E. is used to indicate vowels and syllabic stresses in some religious books, and is almost always found in modern poetry, children's literature, and texts for beginning students of Hebrew. The system is also used sparingly to avoid certain ambiguities of meaning — such as when context is insufficient to distinguish between two identically spelled words — and in the transliteration of foreign names.
All Hebrew consonant phonemes are represented by a single letter. Although a single letter might represent two phonemes — the letter "bet," for example, represents both /b/ and /v/ — the two sounds are always related "hard" (plosive) and "soft" (fricative) forms, their pronunciaton being very often determined by context. In fully pointed texts, the hard form normally has a dot, known as a dagesh, in its center.
The letters hei, vav and yud can represent consonantal sounds (/h/, /v/ and /i/, respectively) or serve as a markers for vowels. In the latter case, these letters are called "emot qria" ("matres lectionis" in Latin, "mothers of reading" in English). The letter hei at the end of a word usually indicates a final /a/, which in turn is usually indicative of feminine gender. Vav may represent /o/ or /u/, and yod may represent /i/. There is no consonantal marker for /e/. In some modern Israeli texts, the letter alef is used to indicate long /a/ sounds in foreign names, particularly those of Arabic origin.
Terminal syllabic emphasis is most common. Fully pointed texts will note variations with a vertical line placed underneath the first consonant of the emphasized syllable, to the left of the vowel mark if there is one.
Romanization
See also Romanization of Hebrew
The Hebrew language is normally written in the Hebrew alphabet. Due to publishing difficulties, and the unfamiliarity of many readers with the alphabet, there are many ways of transcribing Hebrew into Roman letters. The most accurate method is the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is used (in a simplified ASCII form) in the section concerned with phonology, to describe the sounds of the Hebrew language. However, the IPA is not well known, and is often considered cumbersome for transcribing pronunciations for a general audience. Therefore this article uses a different system to express Hebrew pronunciation, and at least some orthographic peculiarities. The system comes down to the following:
- The letter tzadik (צ) is transcribed by "s," although "ts" or "tz" is usually acceptable.
- The letter ‘ayin (ע) is transcribed ', the same as alef. In word-final position, this phoneme is always preceded by the vowel /a/.
- The letter shin (ש) is transcribed by "sh", and the letter sin as "s".
- Both the letter tav (ת) and the letter tet (ט) are transcribed by "t".
- The letter hey (ה) at the end of a word, in those cases where it marks feminine gender, is transcribed by "ah" (it is read /a/).
- The letter chet (ח) is usually transcribed by "ch". "kh" is usually acceptable but not as common. "h" is occasionally used but often avoided as "h" is also used for hey (ה).
- The letter qof (ק) is transcribed by "q" (it is pronounced /k/ by many speakers).
- Single-letter prepositions and the definite article are separated with a dash (-) from their subject.
- Stresses and schwas are not marked.
- The vowels are always written.
- The letter yod is usually transcribed by "y".
See also
Notes
- ^ Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Resurgence of the Hebrew Language by Libby Kantorwitz
- ^ Protest against the suppression of Hebrew in the Soviet Union 1930-1931 signed by Albert Einstein, among others
- ^ Robert Hetzron. (1987). Hebrew. In The World's Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie, 686–704. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-520521-9.
- ^
Bibliography
- Hoffman, Joel M, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0814736548.
- Izre'el, Shlomo, "The emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew", in: Benjamin Hary (ed.), The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH): Working Papers I (2001) [8]
- Kuzar, Ron, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter 2001. ISBN 3-11-016993-2, ISBN 3-11-016992-4.
- Sáenz-Badillos, Angel, A History of the Hebrew Language (trans. John Elwolde). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521556341
External links
- Ethnologue report for Hebrew
- Academy of Hebrew Language, the Institute which prescribes standards for modern Hebrew grammar, orthography, transliteration, and punctuation based upon the study of Hebrew's historical development.
- History of the Hebrew Language
- Grammars
- Dictionaries
- General
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language under GFDL
