Modern Hebrew

Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew
Ivrit
Nativeto

Israel

Native speakers

5.3 million as L1 (not all native) (1998)

as L1 or L2 by all 7.4 million Israelis

Language family

revitalized Mishnaic Hebrew or relexified Yiddish

Writing system

Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew Braille

[1]

Official status
Official languagein

Israel

Recognised minority languagein

Poland

Regulatedby

Academy of the Hebrew Language

( HaAkademia LaLashon HaIvrit)
Language codes

ISO 639-3

heb

Modern Hebrew (Hebrew: , Ivrit Chadashah), also known as Israeli Hebrew (Hebrew:
ivrit yisre'elit), is the result of the most successful language revitalization project in history, and intimately linked to
the Zionist movement and the founding of the modern state of Israel. There is debate over whether it is a direct
continuation of Mishnaic Hebrew or is something closer to a relexified Yiddish, with a grammar that is more Slavic
than Semitic.
The revival of the Hebrew language was led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Modern Hebrew is spoken by about nine million people most of them citizens of Israel, of which three million are
native speakers of Modern Israeli Hebrew, two million are new immigrants, one million are Israeli Arabs and half a
million are Israelis or diaspora Jews who continue to live abroad.
Modern Hebrew is, together with Modern Standard Arabic, an official language of the modern state of Israel, and
before the state's establishment it was one of the official languages of the British Mandate for
Palestine.Wikipedia:Cleanup
The organization that officially directs the development of the Modern Hebrew language, under the law of the State
of Israel, is the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Influences
At present Modern Hebrew has been the native language in many families for three generations. The main
generational differences are in vocabulary, as is true in many other present-day spoken languages.
Modern Hebrew has been developing in a multi-lingual environment. Half of Modern Israeli Hebrew speakers are
not native speakers; furthermore, native speakers of Modern Hebrew usually learn at least one foreign language. In
this situation, Modern Hebrew is affected intensively by many foreign languagesthrough the years Modern Israeli
Hebrew has borrowed many words from Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic (mainly spoken Judeo-Arabic and
various Levantine Arabic dialects), Latin, Greek, Polish, Russian, English and other languages.

Modern Hebrew
According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in the 1880s (the time of the beginning of the Zionist
movement and the Hebrew revival) there were mainly three groups of Hebrew regional accents: Ashkenazi (Eastern
European), Sephardi (Spanish/Portuguese/Italian), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern largely used by Jews of Iraqi,
Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Yemeni heritage). Over time features of these systems of pronunciation
merged, and nowadays we find 2 main pronunciations of colloquial (not liturgical) Hebrew: Oriental and
Non-Oriental.[2]

Classification
The vast majority of scholars see Modern Hebrew as a direct continuation of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, though
they concede that it has acquired some European and colloquial Arabic vocabulary and syntactical features, in much
the same way as Modern Standard Arabic[3] (or even more so, dialects such as Moroccan Arabic). Some dissenting
views are as follows:
Paul Wexler[4] claims that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language at all, but a dialect of "Judaeo-Sorbian". He
argues that the underlying structure of the language is Slavic, but "re-lexified" to absorb much of the vocabulary
and inflectional system of Hebrew in much the same way as a creole. This view forms part of a larger complex of
theories, such as the theory that Ashkenazi Jews are predominantly descended from Slavic and Turkic tribes
rather than from the ancient Israelites.
Shlomo Izre'el[5] focuses on the "emergence" of "Spoken Israeli Hebrew" in terms of a "creation of a new
language" and attempts to fit the nativization of this "new linguistic entity" into the "larger continuum of Creole
and Creole-like languages" but does not seem to believe at all in any relexification hypotheses, whether from a
Slavic or any other linguistic substratum (with references to his own earlier work on the creolization hypothesis
(1986)[6] and the works of Goldenberg (1996)[7] and Kuzar (2001)[8]).
Ghil'ad Zuckermann[9] compromises between Wexler and the majority view: according to him, "Israeli" (his term
for Israeli Hebrew) is a Semito-European hybrid language, which is the continuation not only of literary Hebrew
but also of Yiddish, as well as Polish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic and other languages spoken by
Hebrew revivalists.[10][11] Thus, "Yiddish is a primary contributor to Israeli Hebrew because it was the mother
tongue of the vast majority of revivalists and first pioneers in Eretz Yisrael at the crucial period of the beginning
of Israeli Hebrew".[12] According to Zuckermann, although the revivalists wished to speak Hebrew, with Semitic
grammar and pronunciation, they could not avoid the Ashkenazi mindset arising from their diaspora years. He
argues that their attempt to negate diasporism and avoid hybridity (as reflected in Yiddish) failed. "Had the
revivalists been Arabic-speaking or Berber-speaking Jews (e.g. from Morocco), Israeli Hebrew would have been
a totally different language both genetically and typologically, much more Semitic. The impact of the founder
population on Israeli Hebrew is incomparable with that of later immigrants."[13]

Phonology
Consonants
The Hebrew word for consonants is itsurim (). The following table lists the Hebrew consonants and their
pronunciation in IPA transcription:

Modern Hebrew

Consonants
Labial Alveolar

Nasal

Plosive

pb

td

Affricate
Fricative
Approximant

fv

Post- Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal

alveolar

ts

td

sz

Historical sound changes

Standard (non-Oriental) Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has undergone a number of splits and mergers in its development from
Biblical Hebrew.[14]
BH /b/ had two allophones, [b] and [v]; the [v] allophone has merged with /w/ into SIH /v/
Whereas BH /w/ has become SIH /v/, the phoneme /w/ has been re-introduced into modern Israeli Hebrew in
some loanwords and their derivations (see Hebrew Vav Vav as consonant)
BH /k/ had two allophones, [k] and [x]; the [k] allophone has merged with /q/ into SIH /k/, whereas the [x]
allophone has merged with // into SIH //
BH /t/ and /t/ have merged into SIH /t/
BH // and // have usually merged into SIH //, but this distinction may also be upheld in educated speech of
many Sephardim and some Ashkenazim
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.
Yiddish influence
Though an Ashkenazi Jew in Czarist Russia, the Zionist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda based his Standard Hebrew on the
Sephardic dialect originally spoken in Spain, and therefore recommended an alveolar [r]. But because the first waves
of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were northern Ashkenazi, they came to speak Standard Hebrew with their
preferred uvular articulation as found in Yiddish or modern standard German, and it gradually became the most
prestigious pronunciation for the language. The modern State of Israel has Jews whose ancestors came from all over
the world, but nearly all of them today speak Hebrew with a uvular R because of its modern prestige and historical
elite status.
Oriental Hebrew
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin, and pronounced the Hebrew
rhotic as an alveolar trill, identical to Arabic r. Under pressure to assimilate, many of them began pronouncing
their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative, often identical to Arabic ayn. However, in modern Sephardic and
Mizrahi poetry and folk music, as well as in the standard (or "standardized") Hebrew used in the Israeli media, an
alveolar rhotic is sometimes used. Oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill [r] rather than the uvular trill [],
preserve the pharyngeal consonants // and (less commonly) // rather than merging them with / /, preserve
gemination, and pronounce /e/ in some places where non-Oriental speakers have null (the so-called shva na).

Modern Hebrew
Dagesh
Hebrew also has dagesh, a phonological process of consonant strengthening that is indicated in pointed texts by a dot
placed in the center of a consonant. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (kal, known also as dagesh lene) and
heavy (hazak or dagesh forte). The light version applies to the phonemes /b/ /k/ /p/ (historically, also //, /d/ and /t/),
causing them to be pronounced as stops rather than fricatives, and operates when the dagesh occurs in the beginning
of a word or after a consonant (i.e. a silent shva). The heavy dagesh occurs after vowels and applies to all consonants
except gutturals and /r/, originally causing them to be pronounced as geminate (doubled) consonants; it also selects
the stop allophone of /b/, /k/, /p/, etc. (In Modern Hebrew, gemination has disappeared, and hence the heavy dagesh
has a phonological effect only on /b/ /k/ /p/, affecting them the same as the light dagesh.) Traditional Hebrew
grammar distinguishes two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh according to their historical origin: structural heavy
(hazak tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazak mashlim). Structural heavy dagesh corresponds to consonant
doubling that was inherited from Proto-Semitic, and occurs in certain verb conjugations and noun patterns
(mishkalim and binyanim; see Modern Hebrew grammar). Complementing heavy dagesh corresponds to consonant
doubling that arose within Hebrew as a result of consonant assimilation, most commonly of an /n/ to a following
consonant (e.g. Biblical Hebrew /atta/ "you (m. sg.)" vs. Classical Arabic /anta/).
The pairs /b/~/v/, /k/~//, and /p/~/f/ were historically allophonic, as a consequence of the phenomenon of
spirantization known as begadkefat. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are sometimes phonemic.
This phonemic divergence might be due to a number of factors: mergers involving formerly distinct sounds
(historical pronunciation /w/ of vav merging with fricative bet, becoming /v/, historical pronunciation /q/ of kuf
merging with plosive kaf, becoming /k/, and historical pronunciation // of het merging with fricative kaf, becoming
/x/), 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/ and non-syllable-initial /p/ and /b/ (see Begadkefat).
Varieties of ayin
The letter Ayin ( )historically represented a voiced pharyngeal approximant. Most modern Ashkenazi Jews do not
differentiate between and ;however, many Mizrahi Jews distinguish these phonemes, as well as Jews from any
background wishing to speak Hebrew in its pure (Masoretic Tiberian) form. Georgian Jews pronounce it as [q].
Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it [] (like ng in sing) a
pronunciation that can also be found in the Italian tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany. (The remnants
of this pronunciation are found throughout the Ashkenazi world, in the name "Yankl" and "Yanki", diminutive forms
of Jacob, Heb. ).[citation needed]
Changes in pronunciation of Resh
In Hebrew, the classical pronunciation associated with the consonant r was flapped [], and was grammatically
treated as an ungeminable phoneme of the language. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it
remained a flap or a trill [r]. However, in some Ashkenazi dialects as preserved among Jews in northern Europe it
was a uvular rhotic, either a trill [] or a fricative []. This was because most native dialects of Yiddish were spoken
that way, and their liturgical Hebrew carried the same pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce r as a
guttural [], reflecting their dialect of Arabic.
An apparently unrelated uvular rhotic is believed to have appeared in the Tiberian vocalization of Hebrew, where it
is believed to have coexisted with additional non-guttural articulations of /r/ depending on circumstances.[citation
needed]

Modern Hebrew

Vowels
The Hebrew word for vowels is tnu'ot
(). The orthographic representations
for these vowels are called Niqqud. Israeli
Hebrew has 5 vowel phonemes, represented
by the following Niqqud-signs:

The vowel phonemes of Modern Israeli Hebrew

phoneme

pronunciationin
ModernHebrew

approximatepronunciation
inEnglish

/a/

[]

/e/

/i/
/o/

/u/

orthographic representation
"long" *

"short" *

"very short" /
"interrupted" *

(as in "spa")

kamats gadol (
)

patach ( )

chataf patach ( )

[e]

(as in "bed")

tsere male ( )
or tsere chaser (
)

segol ( )

chataf segol ( ),
sometimes shva ( )

[i]
[o]

(as in "ski")

chirik male ( )

chirik chaser ( )

(as in "more")

cholam male (
) or cholam
chaser ( )

kamatz katan ( )

(as in "flu" but with no

diphthongization)

shuruk ()

kubuts ( )

[u]

chataf kamatz ( )

* The severalfold orthographic representation of each phoneme attests to the broader phonemic range of vowels in earlier forms of Hebrew. Some
linguists still regard the Hebrew grammatical entity of Shva namarked as Shva ()as representing a sixth phoneme, //. However, the phonetic
realisation of any Shva in modern Hebrew is never a Schwa (the mid central vowel denoted as []) or any vowel otherwise phonetically
distinguishable from the other phonemes, but is rather always either identical to those of the phoneme /e/ or is mute, therefore there is no consensus
in this matter.

In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (chataf). However, there is no audible
distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew, except that tsere is often pronounced [e] as in Ashkenazi
Hebrew.
Shva
The Niqqud sign "Shva" represents four grammatical entities: resting (nach / ), moving (na' / ), floating
(merahef / )and "bleating" or "bellowing" (ga'ya / ). In earlier forms of Hebrew, these entities were
phonologically and phonetically distinguishable. However, in Modern Hebrew these distinctions are not observed.
For example, the (first) Shva Nach in the word ( fem. you crumpled) is pronounced [e] ([kimtet]) even
though it should be mute, whereas the Shva Na in ( time), which theoretically should be pronounced, is usually

Modern Hebrew

mute ([zmn]). Sometimes the shva is pronounced like a tsere when accented, as in the prefix "ve" meaning "and".

Stress
Hebrew has two frequent kinds of lexical stress, on the last syllable (milr; )and on the penultimate syllable
(the one preceding the last, mill; ), of which the first is more frequent. Contrary to the prescribed standard,
some words exhibit a stress on the antepenultimate syllable or even further back. This occurs often in loanwords, e.g.
/politika/, "politics", and sometimes in native colloquial compounds, e.g. /eehu/,
"somehow"; /efoehu/,[citation needed] "somewhere". Colloquial stress is also often shifted from the last
syllable to the penultimate, contrary to the prescribed standard, e.g. , normative stress /kova/,
,;"
colloquial stress /kova/ "hat"; normative stress /ova/,??? colloquial stress /ova/, "dovecote". This is
also common in the colloquial pronunciation of many personal names, for example normative stress /david/,
colloquial stress /david/, "David".[15]
Specific rules correlate the location or absence of stress in a syllable with the written representation of vowel length
and whether or not the syllable ends with a vowel or a consonant.[16] Because spoken Israeli Hebrew does not
distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are not evident in speech. They usually cannot be inferred
from written text either, because usually vowel diacritics are omitted. The result is that nowadays stress has
phonemic value, as the following table illustrates: acoustically, the following word pairs differ only in the location of
the stress; orthographically they differ also in the written representation of the length of the vowels, however if
vowel diacritics are omitted (as is usually the case in Modern Israeli Hebrew) they are written identically:
common spelling
(Ktiv Hasar Niqqud)

mill-stressed

milr-stressed

spelling with pronunciation translation spelling with pronunciation

vowel diacritics
vowel diacritics

/jeled/

boy

/oel/

food

/boke/

morning

translation

/jeled/

will give birth

/oel/

eating (masculine
singular participle)

/boke/

cowboy

Little ambiguity exists, however, due to context and syntactic features; compare e.g. the English word "conduct" in
its nominal and verbal forms.

Vocabulary
Modern Israeli Hebrew has borrowed many words from Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic (spoken Arabic, mainly
Judeo Arabic and Palestinian Arabic), German, Latin, Greek, Polish, Russian, English and other languages.[citation
needed]
Some typical examples are:

Modern Hebrew

loanword

derivatives
Hebrew

IPA

origin

Hebrew

IPA

meaning

meaning

/baj/

goodbye

/ezoz/

exhaust
system

/didej/

DJ

/wala/

really!?

/kef/

fun

/lekajef/

to have fun

/afif/

lightly

/lehitafef/

to scram

/aba/

daddy

/lealtar/

immediately

/lealter/

to improvise

/altura/

shoddy job

/lealter/

to moonlight

/balaan/

mess

/levalen/ to make a mess

/tales/

directly

/rop/

deep sleep

/patel/

putty knife

/umi/

rubber

/azoz/

carbonated
beverage

/adrial/

architect

spelling

English

meaning
bye
exhaust
system

/ledade/

to DJ

to DJ
Arabic
[17]

[18]
Aramaic

Russian

Yiddish

/larop/

to sleep deeply
German

/umija/

rubber band
Turkish
from
French

/pustema/ stupid woman

language

really!?

pleasure

lightly

the father

right here

shoddy work

chaos

goal

sleep

Spachtel

putty knife

Gummi

rubber

[20]
gazoz
from
eau gazeuse

carbonated
beverage

[21]

Ladino
/adrialut/

architecture

Akkadian

[19]

inflamed wound
arad-ekalli

[22]

temple servant

Sources
[1] Modern Hebrew reference (http:/ / www. ethnologue. com/ language/ heb) at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
[2] Laufer A. (1999), "Hebrew", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Vol. 20.2, England, 1990, pp. 40-43; or Handbook of the
International Phonetic Association 1999, pp. 96-99
[3] Blau, Joshua, Tehiyyt ha'ivrt ut'hiyyt ha'aravt hasifrutt: kavm makbilm umafridm (The Renaissance of Hebrew in the Light of the
Renaissance of Standard Arabic) (=Texts and Studies, vol. ix), Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1976; Blau, Joshua, The
Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic: Parallels and Differences in the Revival of Two Semitic Languages (http:/ /
books. google. co. il/ books/ about/ The_Renaissance_of_Modern_Hebrew_and_Mod. html?id=EwbvrNRcaNIC& redir_esc=y) (=Near
Eastern Studies, vol. xviii), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981.
[4] Wexler, Paul, The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past: 1990.
[5] Izre'el, Shlomo (2003). "The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew." In: Benjamin H. Hary (ed.), Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew:
Towards the Compilation of The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH)", Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, The Chaim Rosenberg School of
Jewish Studies, 2003, pp. 85-104.
[6] Izre'el, Shlomo (1986). "Was the Revival of the Hebrew Language a Miracle? On Pidginization and Creolization Processes in the Creation of
Modern Hebrew." Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress for Jewish Studies (http:/ / books. google. co. il/ books/ about/
Proceedings_of_the_Ninth_World_Congress. html?id=c8FPAQAAIAAJ& redir_esc=y), Part 4, Vol. 1: Hebrew and Judaic Languages; Other
Languages. Jerusalem. 1986. 77-84. (In Hebrew)
[7] Goldenberg, Gideon (1996). "Ha'ivrit kelashon shemit xaya." In: Evolution and Renewal: Trends in the Development of the Hebrew
Language. (Publications of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Section of Humanities.) Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of
Sciences and Humanities. 148-190. (In Hebrew.)
[8] Kuzar, R. (2001). Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse-Analytic Cultural Study (http:/ / muse. jhu. edu/ login?auth=0& type=summary& url=/
journals/ israel_studies/ v007/ 7. 3ben-rafael. html). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
[9] Zuckermann, Ghil'had (2005). Abba, Why Was Professor Higgins Trying to Teach Eliza to Speak Like Our Cleaning Lady?: Mizrahim,
Ashkenazim, Prescriptivism and the Real Sounds of the Israeli Language (http:/ / www. zuckermann. org/ pdf/ abba. pdf)

Modern Hebrew
[10] Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "Complement Clause Types in Israeli", Complementation: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, edited by R. M. W.
Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 72-92.
[11] See p. 62 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "A New Vision for 'Israeli Hebrew': Theoretical and Practical Implications of Analysing Israel's
Main Language as a Semi-Engineered Semito-European Hybrid Language", Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5 (1), pp. 57-71.
[12] Ibid., p. 63.
[13] ibid.
[14] Robert Hetzron. (1987). Hebrew. In The World's Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie, 686704. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN
0-19-520521-9.
[15] Netser, Nisan, Niqqud halakha le-maase, 1976, p. 11.
[16] These rules are sometimes slightly different for verbs and nouns; thus the stress in the noun ( /davar/, "thing") and the verb
(/avar/ "to overpower") are both on the last syllable, even though this syllable is pointed with the sign for a long vowel for the noun and for
a short vowel for the verb. Modern classification of vowel diacritics according to the vowel length they allegedly denote, however, might not
concur with the historically correct phonological distinction between vowel lengths, see Tiberian vocalization Full vowels.
[17] Loanwords in Hebrew from Arabic (http:/ / www. safa-ivrit. org/ imported/ arabic. php)
[18] morfix dictionary (http:/ / morfix. mako. co. il/ default. aspx?q=& source=milon)
[19] Loanwords in Hebrew from Russian (http:/ / www. safa-ivrit. org/ imported/ russian. php)
[20] Loanwords in Hebrew from Turkish (http:/ / www. safa-ivrit. org/ imported/ turkish. php)
[21] Loanwords in Hebrew from Ladino (http:/ / www. safa-ivrit. org/ imported/ ladino. php)
[22] Loanwords in Hebrew from Akkadian (http:/ / www. safa-ivrit. org/ imported/ akkadian. php)

Bibliography
Haiim B. Rosn (1962). A Textbook of Israeli Hebrew (http://books.google.com/books?id=d3IqE5f455wC).
University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-72603-8.
Gila Freedman Cohen; Carmia Shoval (2011). Easing Into Modern Hebrew Grammar: A User-friendly Reference
and Exercise Book (http://books.google.com/books?id=-I86twAACAAJ). Magnes Press.
ISBN978-965-493-601-9.
Ornan, Uzzi (2003). The Final Word: Mechanism for Hebrew Word Generation (http://www.jstor.org/
discover/10.2307/27913706?uid=3738240&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103332721927). Haifa University.
Ben-ayyim, Zeev (1992). The Struggle for a Language. Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Notes
External links
The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew - introduction (http://humanities.tau.ac.il/~cosih/english/) by the
Tel-Aviv University
Hebrew Today - Should You Learn Modern Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew? (http://www.hebrewtoday.com/
content/should-you-learn-modern-hebrew-or-biblical-hebrew)

References

Article Sources and Contributors

Article Sources and Contributors

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