[...] last day or two.  Each is worth a few moments to read: a review of Resurrecting Hebrew (HT: Charles Halton) and two digests of articles at בלשנות by J. Blau and S. [...]

Charles,

Would you care to elaborate on your assessment that Modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language? You seem to have a syntactic definition that interestingly absent from most discussions of what features bind the Semitic languages together as a family.

Indeed, I’m curious about your definition of Semitic and would like to illustrate your syntactic principle by applying it to some oddities in Semitic. For instance, the strict verb-final syntax of Akkadian is arguably not “Semitic,” so is Akkadian also not a Semitic language? Perhaps a better example would be Ge’ez, with its internally-headed relative clauses and other delightful examples of Cushitic influence — is Ge’ez then not Semitic?

I am granting you the benefit of the doubt for the moment, since this was a short post, but I hope you’ve not swallowed Wexler and Zuckerman, or whomever you’ve read, uncritically…

I am of the opinion, given the wealth and productivity of literary Hebrew up to the 19th century, that Shlomo Izreel’s idea that Modern Hebrew is an example of “revernacularization” is more accurate. The Indo-European influences you claim to see are thus the result of the first languages of the various waves of immigration, but do not disqualify Hebrew as Semitic.

Cheers,
Robert Holmstedt

Robert,

I haven’t taken Wexler and Zuckerman uncritically, I was being hyperbolic to stir up some discussion. However, a retired prof at HUC does believe this.

I mainly was wanting get people to read the article and think a little about how Modern Hebrew came about. There are many students that I encounter that think that biblical and Modern Hebrew are identical.

While I think that there was a certain amount of invention that went into the revivification of Hebrew, I would generally agree with you and Izreel on revernacularization.

Charles,

Hmm … clearly I didn’t catch the hyperbole.

From what I can tell, many (but not all) of those who have strong opinions about the Semitic-ness of Modern Hebrew also have strong opinions about Zionism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Since I have no interest in that discussion, I get a bit frustrated at the ideologically-based misuse (or complete ignoring of) sensible historical and comparative linguistic work. Thus my reaction to your hyperbole.

~Robert

I agree with Halton.
I learned it my own way.
As a native speaker of Arabic I discovered and now I can read Biblical Hebrew at http://www.blueletterbible.org.
I did not need to take a course in Hebrew or Biblical hebrew at all. simply because Anceint Hebrew is Arabic.
all I needed to do is rotate some letters backwards to its original postion (turned out Herodian caligraphy did rotate some letters for the purpose of preventing people at that time from reading the ancient bible and instead read the pharaisees’ new version of it.

You also have to throw all punctuation marks etc in the garbage). they were added in the 8-9 century to prevent Arabic readers from reading the bible.

By using the Lexicon in that site (called Strong’s Lexicon) I can find the arabic word for the hebrew word (which is the same word anyway)
and suddenly I am reading the bible in my first language (rabi).
but since I don’t understand a word on Radio Israel for example (etc..) then the two languages are not related (the Modern Hebrew and the Biblical Hebrew) !!!