Hebrew spoken today in Israel is not the same as the Hebrew of the Bible biblical
Hebrews related grammatically to Arabic and other Semitic languages while modern
Hebrew is a spoken language that dramatically transformed in the last few
hundred years is pronounced very differently than Biblical Hebrew
probably was and then there's liturgical Hebrew used
in Jewish prayers its scholarly and rabbinic and dates from the Middle Ages
all are written in Hebrew script which uses letters for consonants but mainly
leaves out vowels that said prayer books and Hebrew learning textbooks have dots
added that mark the vowels these were invented in the medieval period by a
group called the mazarites modern hebrew spoken in israel is quite distinct from
its predecessors and emerged out of a movement in eastern europe in the mid to
late 1800s men with traditional Jewish education z' were moving to larger
cities where they aspired to write modern secular fiction in Hebrew this
was a way to express the idea that Jews could connect to a collective national
identity rooted in the distant past while still participating in the culture
of modern Europe where literature was so important in writing modern Hebrew
literature they realized they had to find words for concepts that didn't
exist in the Bible or rabbinic tradition so they found biblical words with
unclear meanings and gave them new ones for example the prophet Ezekiel uses the
word hush Moll to mean some kind of supernatural divine bright or shiny
power modern Hebrew writers adopted it as the word for electricity once Hebrew
became a spoken language it grew rapidly Zionist movement like other national
movements at that time believed that only by speaking a unified national
language could a group be a true nation and in some Zionist leaders views the
correct national language was not the language Jews spoke at home for
generations now Yiddish not Ladino it was Hebrew the language of a more
ancient Jewish identity quick aside Aramaic Yiddish and Ladino the languages
many Jewish communities spoke before Hebrew all look very similar to Hebrew
as they use the same alphabet but you dishes closer to Germany and l'idée
was closer to Spanish promoters of Hebrew often had very negative feelings
about Yiddish which they call it a jargon very negative Pro Hebrew
activists once interrupted a Yiddish film screening in Tel Aviv by throwing
stink bombs in the theater a less extreme group led by Eliezer ben-yehuda
often considered the father of modern hebrew founded a Hebrew language
committee to come up with new words as needed and answer questions about proper
usage educators taught Hebrew in schools to immigrants and 1925 Hebrew University
was established in Jerusalem even before Jewish statehood new generations of
Jewish immigrants to Palestine began to speak Hebrew and as they did the
language changed people invented new words new grammatical structures and
borrowed words from other languages like telephone because many early speakers
natively spoke Yiddish polish or Russian lots of grammatical patterns and terms
from these languages made their way into Hebrew and because of the influence of
Palestinian Arabs and Middle Eastern Jews Hebrew also has borrowed a lot of
Arabic terms sometimes official promoters of Hebrew pushback they
published newspaper columns trying to correct common errors or offer Hebrew
words for foreign ones but many of these incorrect usages became part of the
language Jewish communities around the world developed different pronunciations
for instance the letter ion is treated like an Aleph by many native speakers
and left silent but it shows up in Mizrahi accents as a guttural sound more
like Arabic Ashkenazi Jews have a different pronunciation than Safari Jews
is it at all eat or at Aulis in Israel speakers of modern Hebrew can usually
understand biblical and rabbinic Hebrew and they learn text in them in public
schools but they don't necessarily understand all the nuances for instance
when God tells Abraham to sacrifice a three-year-old calf the Bible uses the
term egg la mejor leche it but in modern hebrew the word measureless yet means
triangular so to a modern reader this translates as triangular calf which
wasn't a hundred percent the original meaning hebrews always developed in
contact with other languages because Jews have always lived in contact with
other groups of people in the Diaspora and
a great example is how Israelis and phone calls as we'll do right now with a
mash-up of Hebrew Arabic and English dope yellow by
you