Hebrew language

"Hebrew" redirects here. For other uses, see Hebrew (disambiguation).

Hebrew
עִבְרִית 'Ivrit
Pronunciation	[ʔivˈrit] (standard Israeli), [ʕivˈɾit] (standard Israeli (Sephardi)), [ʕivˈriθ] (Oriental), [ˈivʀis] (Ashkenazi)
Region	Israel Global (as a liturgical language for Judaism)
Native speakers	Around 7 million speakers. Extinct as a spoken language by the 4th century CE; Sephardi Hebrew revived in the 1880s (United States: 195,375).1 1United States Census 2000 PHC-T-37. Ability to Speak English by Language Spoken at Home: 2000. Template:PDFlink
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Hebrew
Writing system	Hebrew alphabet
Official status
Official language in	Israel
Regulated by	Academy of the Hebrew Language האקדמיה ללשון העברית([HaAqademia LaLashon Ha‘Ivrit] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help))
Language codes
ISO 639-1	he
ISO 639-2	heb
ISO 639-3	Either: heb – Modern Hebrew hbo – Ancient Hebrew

Hebrew (עִבְרִית, ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world. In Israel, it is spoken by the majority of the population, though both Arabic and Hebrew are official languages. Hebrew is also spoken as a mother tongue by the Samaritans, though today fewer than a thousand Samaritans remain. As a foreign language it is studied mostly by Jews and students of Judaism and Israel, archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilisations and by theologians.

The modern word "Hebrew" is derived from the word "Ibriy" which in turn is based upon the root "`abar" (עבּר) meaning "to cross over". The related name Eber occurs in Genesis 10:21 and means "the one who traverses". In the Bible "Hebrew" is called Yehudith (יהודית) because Judah (Yehuda) was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation, late 8th century (Is 36, 2 Kings 18).

The core of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) is written in Classical Hebrew, and much of its present form is specifically the dialect of Biblical Hebrew that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, around the time of the Babylonian exile. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon HaKodesh (לשון הקודש), "The Holy Language", since ancient times.

jewish people are jewish and they do jewish things and they are jews i am so very smart :)

Modern Hebrew

Main article: Revival of the Hebrew language

Development

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 Israeli Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, New Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew, Standard Hebrew, and so on. Israeli Hebrew exhibits many features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Hameassef (The Gatherer), was published by Maskilim litterati in Königsberg from 1783 onwards. In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. HaMagid, founded in Lyck, Prussia, in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Chaim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language.

The revival of the Hebrew language 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 immigrated to Palestine, 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 different 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 1904-1914 "second aliyah" that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the more highly 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. A constructed modern language with a truly Semitic vocabulary and written appearance, although often European in phonology, was to take its place among the current languages of the nations.

Reactions

While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous (because Hebrew was the holy language of the Torah and therefore some thought that it should not be used to discuss common everyday matters), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of the Palestine Mandate who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. It has been said that Hebrew unified the new immigrants coming to Mandate Palestine, creating a common language and culture. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. Later it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an organization that still 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 Palestine. At the time, members of the Old Yishuv and a very few Chasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar, refused to speak Hebrew and only spoke Yiddish. However, while this ideological stance persists in certain quarters, almost all members of these groups have learned modern Hebrew in order to interact with outsiders.

Russia and the Soviet Union

Main articles: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union and Yevsektsiya

Russian has separate terms for Ancient Hebrew (Древнееврейский язык, "ancient Jewish language") and Modern Hebrew (Иврит (Ivrit), directly borrowed from the Hebrew name).

The Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew "reactionary" since it was associated with both Judaism and Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education) as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself didn't cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes). The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being the spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be treated as a foreign language. Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests in the West, teachers and students who attempted to study the Hebrew language were pilloried and sentenced for "counter revolutionary" and later for "anti-Soviet" activities. Later in the 1980s in the USSR, Hebrew studies reappeared due to people struggling for permission to go to Israel (refuseniks). Several of the teachers were imprisoned, for example, Ephraim Kholmyansky,Yevgeny Korostyshevsky and others responsible for a Hebrew learning network connecting many cities of USSR.

Birobidzhan

Birobidzhan Jewish National University works in cooperation with the local Jewish community of Birobidzhan. The university is unique in the Russian Far East. The basis of the training course is study of the Hebrew language, history and classic Jewish texts. In recent years, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast has grown interested in its Jewish roots. Students study Hebrew and Yiddish at a Jewish school and Birobidzhan Jewish National University. In 1989, the Jewish center founded its Sunday school, where children study Yiddish, learn folk Jewish dance, and learn about the history of Israel. The Israeli government helps fund the program. Chief Rabbi Mordechai Scheiner has commented the progress at School No. 2, Birobidjan's Jewish public school with 670 students, 30 percent of whom are Jewish. Pupils learn about Jewish history, and the Hebrew and Yiddish languages.

Modern Israeli Hebrew

Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation. However, the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native tongue and often brought into Hebrew idioms and literal translations from Yiddish. Similarly, the language as spoken in Israel has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in the following respects:

• the elimination of pharyngeal articulation in the letters chet and ayin
• the conversion of /r/ from an alveolar flap ([ɾ]) to a voiced uvular fricative ([ʁ]) or trill ([ʀ]) (see Guttural R)
• the pronunciation (by many speakers) of tzere as [eɪ] in some contexts (sifrey and teysha instead of Sephardic sifré and tésha' )
• the elimination of vocal schwa (zman instead of Sephardic zĕman)
• some of the letter names (yud and kuf instead of Sephardic yod and qof)
• in popular speech, penultimate stress in proper names (Dvóra instead of Dĕvorá; Yehúda instead of Yĕhudá)
• similarly, penultimate stress in nouns or verbs with a second or third person plural suffix (katávtem "you wrote" instead of kĕtavtém).

Classification

Although the majority of scholars see Modern Hebrew as a genuine continuation of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, while conceding that it has acquired some European vocabulary and syntactical features, in much the same way as Modern Standard Arabic (or even more so, dialects such as Moroccan Arabic), two dissenting views are as follows:

• Paul Wexler 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 inflexional system of Hebrew in much the same way as a creole.
  

• Ghil'ad Zuckermann 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. 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". 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 European background. He argues that their attempt to deny their European roots, negate diasporism and avoid hybridity (as reflected in Yiddish) failed. "Had the revivalists been Arabic-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."

So far, neither view has gained significant acceptance among mainstream linguists. However, some linguists, for example American Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz, have employed Zuckermann's glottonym "Israeli" and accept his notion of hybridity. Few would dispute that Hebrew has acquired some European features as a result of having been learned by immigrants as a second language at a crucial formative stage. The identity of the European substrate/adstrate has varied: in the time of the Mandate and the early State, the principal contributor was Yiddish, while today it is American English. There has also been some influence, on vocabulary rather than structure, from Arabic during the large scale immigrations of Mizrahi Jews during the 1950-60s, the Yemenite and North African dialects. Some Russian influence may also be observed, both during the founding period and as a result of recent immigration.

Regional dialects

According to Ethnologue, the currently spoken dialects of Hebrew are "Standard Hebrew (General Israeli, Europeanized Hebrew)" and "Oriental Hebrew (Arabized Hebrew, Yemenite Hebrew)". These refer to two varieties used for actual communication by native speakers in Israel; they differ mainly in pronunciation, and hardly in any other way.

Immigrants to Israel are 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 some 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] allophones of Template:Hebrew (/t/) into the single phone [t]. Most Sephardic and Mizrahi dialects share this feature, though some (such as those of Iraq and Yemen) differentiate between these two pronunciations as /t/ and /θ/. Within Israel, however, the pronunciation of Hebrew 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 Template:Hebrew as [ʀ] (a uvular trill, as in Yiddish and French) or as [ʁ] (a voiced uvular fricative, as in Standard German), rather than as [r], an alveolar trill, as in Spanish and Italian. The pronunciation of this phoneme is often used among Israelis as a shibboleth or determinant when ascertaining the national origin of perceived foreigners.

There are mixed views on the status of the two dialects. On the one hand, prominent Israelis of Sephardic or Oriental origin are admired for the purity of their speech and Yemenite Jews are often employed as newsreaders. On the other hand, the speech of middle-class Ashkenazim is regarded as having a certain Central European sophistication, and many speakers of Mizrahi origin have moved nearer to this version of Standard Hebrew, in some cases even adopting the uvular resh.

It was formerly the case that the inhabitants of the north of Israel pronounced beth rafe (בי"ת רפה, bet without dagesh, literally loose beth: ב) as /b/ instead of /v/, in accordance with the conservative Sephardic pronunciation . This was regarded as rustic and has since disappeared. It is said that one can tell an inhabitant of Jerusalem by the pronunciation of the word for two hundred as "ma'atayim" (מאתיים, as distinct from "matayim", as heard elsewhere in the country). Today, Israeli Hebrew is virtually uniform, the only noticeable variation being along ethnic lines. It is widely felt that these differences, too, have been disappearing among the younger generation.

Aramaic

Main article: Judeo-Aramaic language

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 coevolved with Hebrew throughout much of its history, as major languages in the region. The words in Greek and Hebrew at the time corresponding to the word "Hebrew" (Εβραις, Εβραιστι, עברית יהודית) are distinguished from Aramaic συριστι συριακη.

The Persian Empire that captured Babylonia a few decades later adopted Imperial Aramaic as the official international language of the Persian Empire. The Israelite population, who had been exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem and its surrounding region of Judah, were allowed to return to Jerusalem to establish a Persian province, usually called Judea. Thus under occupation and enslavement, Aramaic became the administrative language for Judea when dealing with the rest of the Persian Empire.

The Aramaic script also evolved from the Paleo-Semitic script, but they diverged significantly. By the 1st century CE, the Aramaic script developed into the distinctive Hebrew square script (also known as Assyrian Script, Ktav Ashuri), extant in the Dead Sea Scrolls and similar to the script still in use today.

One of several languages known to Jesus was a dialect of Aramaic. Those in the North of Israel, in Galilee, interacted with Aramaic-speaking societies to the North and East, including for trade. Under Roman occupation, they also spoke some Greek or Latin. In the South around Jerusalem, and in Tiberias, the Jews spoke Hebrew.

Displacement

By the early half of the 20th century, most scholars followed Geiger and Dalman in thinking that Aramaic became a spoken language in the land of Israel by the start of Israel's Hellenistic Period in the 4th century BCE, and that as a corollary Hebrew ceased to function as a spoken language around the same time. Segal, Klausner, and Ben Yehuda are notable exceptions to this view. During the latter half of the 20th century, accumulating archaeological evidence and especially linguistic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls has disproven that view. The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in 1946-1948 near Qumran revealed ancient Jewish texts overwhelmingly in Hebrew, not Aramaic. The Qumran scrolls indicate that Hebrew texts were readily understandable to the average Israelite, and that the language had evolved since Biblical times as spoken languages do. Recent scholarship recognizes that reports of Jews speaking in Aramaic indicates a multi-lingual society, not necessarily the primary language spoken. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew co-existed within Israel as a spoken language.

Some further evidence for this contention has been found in the Christian Bible, in which rare occasions of someone speaking in Aramaic are given special attention as being unusual. Rather than dialogue being primarily in Aramaic with the exceptional Hebrew, the New Testament presupposes dialogue in Hebrew and points out Aramaic discussions as being exceptions to normal speech.

Similarly, Paul is portrayed as speaking to a crowd of Jews têi hebraïdi dialéktôi lit.'in the Hebrew dialect'. A commonly proposed translation for this Greek passage is 'in the Aramaic vernacular of Palestine'. Such a translation ignores, of course, the fact that Aramaic has a standard word in Greek συριστι/συριακη (cf. LXX Job 42:17ff, and Dan 2:4.), it is really only based on place names that are called Hebrew and that had an Aramaizing etymology. In a groundbreaking article Grintz suggested that Hebrew, rather than Aramaic, lay behind the composition of the Gospel of Matthew. Grintz dates the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman Period. Hebrew nonetheless continued on as a literary language down through Byzantine Period from the 4th century CE.

Further information: Hebrew of Jesus

The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for the land of Israel. Hebrew functioned as the local mother tongue with powerful ties to Israel's history, origins, and golden age and as the language of Israel's religion; Aramaic functioned as the international language with the rest of the Mideast; and eventually Greek functioned as another international language with the eastern areas of the Roman Empire. Communities of Jews (and non-Jews) are known, who immigrated to Judea from these other lands and continued to speak Aramaic or Greek.

Many Hebrew linguists postulate the survival of Hebrew as a spoken language until the Byzantine Period, but some historians do not accept this. The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls distinguishes the Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew from the various dialects of Biblical Hebrew out of which it evolved: "This book presents the specific features of DSS Hebrew, emphasizing deviations from classical BH." The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church which once said, in 1958 in its first edition, that Hebrew "ceased to be a spoken language around the fourth century BCE", now says, in its 1997 (third) edition, that Hebrew "continued to be used as a spoken and written language in the New Testament period". An Introductory Grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew says, "It is generally believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the Copper Scroll and also the Bar Kokhba letters, have furnished clear evidence of the popular character of MH [Mishnaic Hebrew]." And so on. It is widespread among Israeli scholars to treat Hebrew as a spoken language as a feature of Judea's Roman Period.

Dialects

The international language of Aramaic radiated into various regional dialects. In and around Judea, various dialects of Old Western Aramaic emerged, including the Jewish dialect of Old Judean Aramaic during the Roman Period. Josephus Flavius initially drafted his account of The Jewish War in Old Judean Aramaic but later recast it into Koine Greek to publish it for the Roman imperial court. Unfortunately Josephus's Aramaic version has not survived.

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 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 continues to strongly influence all these various Jewish dialects of Aramaic.

Other coexisting languages

Main article: Jewish languages

Besides Jewish dialects of Aramaic, other languages are highly influenced by Hebrew, such as Yiddish, Ladino, Karaite and Judeo-Arabic. Although none is completely derived from Hebrew, they all make extensive use of Hebrew loanwords.

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.

Phonology

Main article: Hebrew phonology

Vowels

Main article: Niqqud

The vowel phonemes of Modern Israeli Hebrew

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

phoneme	pronunciation in Modern Hebrew	approximate pronunciation in English	othographic representation
			"long" *	"short" *	"very short" / "interrupted" *
/a/	[a]	(as in "spa")	kamats ( ָ )	patach ( ַ )	chataf patach ( ֲ )
/e/	[ɛ̝] or [e̞]	(as in "bet")	tsere male ( ֵי ) or tsere chaser ( ֵ )	[segol] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized variant: latin (help) ( ֶ )	chataf segol ( ֱ ), sometimes shva ( ְ )
/i/	[i]	(as in "ski")	khirik male ( ִי )	khirik chaser ( ִ )
/o/	[ɔ̝] or [o̞]	(as in "gore")	kholam male ( וֹ ) or kholam chaser ( ֹ )	kamatz katan ( ָ )	chataf kamatz ( ֳ )
/u/	[u]	(as in "flu" but with no diphthongization)	shuruk (וּ)	kubuts ( ֻ )
* 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 na—marked as Shva (ְ)—as representing a sixth phoneme, /ə/.

In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (khataf). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew, except that [tsere] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) is often pronounced [eɪ] as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.

Shva

The Niqqud sign "Shva" represents four grammatical entities: resting (nakh / נָח), moving (na' / נָע), floating (merahef / מְרַחֵף) and "bleating" or "bellowing" ('ge'iya' / גְּעִיָּה). 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 קִמַּטְתְ (fem. you crumpled) is usually pronounced [ə] (or [ɛ]) ([ki'matɛt]) even though it should be mute, whereas the Shva Na in זְמַן (time), which theoretically should be pronounced, is usually mute ([zman]). Sometimes the shva is pronounced like a tsere when accented, as in the prefix "ve" meaning "and".

One-letter Prefixes

Hebrew uses a number of one-letter prefixes that are added to words for various purposes. These are called "Letters of Use" (Hebrew: אותיות השימוש, Otiyot HaShimush). Such items include: the definite article ha- (/ha/) (="the"); prepositions be- (/bə/) (="in"), le- (/lə/) (="to"), mi- (/mi/) (="from"; a shortened version of the preposition min'); conjunctions ve- (/və/) (="and"), she- (/ʃe/) (="that"), ke- (/kə/) (="as", "like").

The vowel accompanying each of these letters may differ from those listed above, depending on the first letter or vowel following it. The rules governing these changes are hardly observed in colloquial speech, as most speakers tend to employ the regular form. The correct form may be heard in more formal circumstances. For example, if a preposition is put before a word which begins with a moving shwa, then the preposition takes the vowel /i/ (and the initial consonant may be weakened): colloquial be-kfar (="in a village") corresponds to the more formal bi-khfar.

The definite article may be inserted between a preposition or a conjunction and the word it refers to, creating composite words like mé-ha-kfar (="from the village"). The latter also demonstrates the change in the vowel of mi-. With be and le, the definite article is assimilated into the prefix, which then becomes ba or la. Thus *be-ha-matos becomes ba-matos (="in the plane"). Note that this does not happen to mé (the form of "min" or "mi-" used before the letter "he"), therefore mé-ha-matos is a valid form, which means "from the airplane".

* indicates that the given example is grammatically non standard

Consonants

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

	Bilabial		Labiodental		Alveolar		Post- alveolar		Palatal	Velar		Uvular		Glottal
Nasals	mTemplate:Hebrew				nTemplate:Hebrew
Stops	pTemplate:Hebrew	bTemplate:Hebrew			tTemplate:Hebrew	dTemplate:Hebrew				kTemplate:Hebrew	gTemplate:Hebrew			a'a, aTemplate:Hebrew
Affricates					ʦTemplate:Hebrew
Fricatives			fTemplate:Hebrew	vTemplate:Hebrew	sTemplate:Hebrew	zTemplate:Hebrew	ʃTemplate:Hebrew	ʒTemplate:Hebrew		xTemplate:Hebrew			ʁTemplate:Hebrew	hTemplate:Hebrew ɦ
Trills												ʀTemplate:Hebrew
Approximants									jTemplate:Hebrew
Laterals					lTemplate:Hebrew

The pairs /b, v/, /k, x/ and /p, f/ 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.

[[ayin|Template:Hebrew]] was once pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. Most modern Ashkenazi Jews do not differentiate between [[aleph|א]] and ע; however, Mizrahi Jews and Arabs pronounce these phonemes. Georgian Jews pronounce it as a glottalized q. Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it [ŋ] (like ng in sing)– a pronunciation which 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. יעקב.)

Hebrew also has dagesh, a strengthening. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (kal, known also as dagesh lene) and heavy (hazak or dagesh forte). There are two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh: structural heavy (hazak tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazak mashlim). The light affects the phonemes /b/ /k/ /p/ (historically, also /g/, /d/ and /t/) 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. Historical evidence indicates that /g/, /d/ and /t/ also used to have allophones marked by the presence or absence of dagesh kal: these have disappeared from modern Hebrew pronunciation though the distinction in writing still appears in fully pointed texts. All consonants except gutturals and /r/ may receive the heavy emphasis (dagesh hazak).

Historical sound changes

Standard (non-Oriental) Israeli Hebrew (SIH) has undergone a number of splits and mergers in its development from Biblical Hebrew.

• 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 /ħ/ into SIH /x/
• BH /t/ and /tˤ/ have merged into SIH /t/
• BH /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ have usually merged into SIH /ʔ/, 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.

Stress

Hebrew has two kinds of stress: on the last syllable (milra‘; מלרע) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, mil‘el; מלעיל). The former is more frequent, though spoken Hebrew admits of more stress variation than the official dialect. Specific rules connect the location or absence of stress in a syllable with vowel length and the syllable's ending. Theses rules are different for verbs and nouns; thus, the mil‘el-stressed ókhel (="food") and milra‘-stressed okhèl (="eats", masculine) differ only in the length of the vowels (and are written identically if vowels are not marked). However, due to the fact that Israeli Hebrew does not distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are not evident in everyday speech. They usually cannot be inferred from written text either, since usually vowels are not marked. The result is that nowadays stress has phonemic value, e.g. "ילד", when pronounced /'jeled/, means "boy", whereas when pronounced /je'led/ it means "will give birth to". Little ambiguity exists, however, due to nouns and verbs having incompatible roles in normal sentences. This is also true in English, for example, with the English word "conduct" in its nominal and verbal forms.

Grammar

Main article: Hebrew grammar

Hebrew grammar is partly analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than grammatical cases. However, inflection plays a decisive role in the formation of the verbs and nouns. E.g. nouns have a construct state, called "smikhut", to denote the relationship of "belonging to": this is the converse of the genitive case of more inflected languages. Words in smikhut are often combined with hyphens. In modern speech, the use of the construct is sometimes interchangeable with the preposition "shel", meaning "of". There are many cases, however, where older declined forms are retained (especially in idiomatic expressions and the like), and "person"-enclitics are widely used to "decline" prepositions.

Writing system

Main article: Hebrew alphabet

Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet. Modern scripts are based on the "square" letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which was developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive Hebrew script is used in handwriting, but the letters tend to be more circular in form when written in cursive, and sometimes vary markedly from their printed equivalents. The medieval version of the cursive script forms the basis of another font, known as Rashi script, equivalent to italics, which is used for commentaries and marginal notes in religious texts.

Vowel signs

Original Biblical Hebrew text contained nothing but consonants and spaces and this is still the case with Torah scrolls that are used in synagogues. A system of writing vowels called niqqud (lit. "dotting") (from the root word meaning "points" or "dots") developed around the 5th Century CE. It is used today in printed Bibles and some other religious books and also in poetry, children's literature, and texts for beginning students of Hebrew. Most modern Hebrew texts contain only consonant letters, spaces and western-style punctuation and to facilitate reading without vowels matres lectionis (see below) are often inserted into words which would be written without them in a text with full niqqud. The niqqud system is sometimes used when it is necessary 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.

Consonant letters

All Hebrew consonant phonemes are represented by a single letter (with some exceptions in Modern Hebrew). 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 pronunciation being very often determined by context. In fully pointed texts, the hard form normally has a dot, known as a dagesh, in its center.

There are twenty-seven symbols, representing twenty-two letters, in the Hebrew alphabet, which is called the "aleph bet" because of its first two letters. The letters are as follows: Aleph, Bet/Vet, Gimel, Dalet, He, Vav, Zayin, Chet, Tet, Yod (pronounced Yud by Israelis), Kaf/Chaf, Lamed, Mem, Nun, Samekh, Ayin, Pe/Fe, Tzadi, Qof (pronounced Koof by Israelis), Resh, Shin/Sin, Tav.

• The letters Bet, Kaf and Pe (historically, also the letters Gimel, Dalet and Tav) are softened to fricatives when following a vowel (except when doubled). In a fully pointed text, this distinction is indicated by the use of dagesh to denote the hard sound. (Occasionally, a horizontal line called rafe, written above the letter, is used to indicate the softened sound.) This has led to the misconception that there are separate letters "Vet", "Chaf" and "Fe".
• The letter Shin/Sin is usually pronounced Sh, but occasionally S. In fully pointed texts, this distinction is indicated by a dot at the top left hand corner (for Sin) or the top right hand corner (for Shin). This may indicate that the pronunciation prevailing when the consonantal spelling of Hebrew was fixed was different from that prevailing when the system of pointing was devised, so that the Sin dot is a permanent reminder saying "this letter is spelled Shin but pronounced Samech". (In Samaritan Hebrew Shin is pronounced Sh wherever it occurs, and there is no "Sin".) Others regard Sin as a genuine phoneme separate from both Shin and Samech and believe that it must once have had a distinct pronunciation.
• There are two written forms of the letters Kaf/Chaf, Mem, Nun, Pe and Tzadi. Each of these is written differently when appearing at the end of a word than when appearing at the beginning or in the middle of the word. The version used at the end of a word is referred to as Final Kaf, Final Mem, etc. Except in the case of Mem, the difference is that the final form has a tail pointing straight down, whereas in the normal form it bends to the left to point to the next letter.

Mater lectionis

The letters he, vav and yod can represent consonantal sounds (/h/, /v/ and /j/, respectively) or serve as a markers for vowels. In the latter case, these letters are called "emot q'ria" ("matres lectionis" in Latin, "mothers of reading" in English).

The letter he at the end of a word usually indicates a final /a/, which usually indicates feminine gender, or /e/, which usually indicates masculine gender. In rare cases it may also indicate /o/, such as in שְׁלֹמֹה (Shlomo, Solomon). It may also indicate a possessive suffix for 3rd person feminine singular (סִפְרָהּ, her book), but in that case the he is not a mater lectionis but the consonant /h/, although in spoken Hebrew the distinction is rarely made. In texts with niqqud the he is written with a mappiq in the latter case. Correct pronunciation must be guessed according to context and niqqud may be used for disambiguation.

Vav may represent /o/ or /u/, and yod may represent /i/ or /e/. Sometimes a double yud is used for /ej/ or /aj/ (this convention is derived from Yiddish). In some modern Israeli texts, the letter alef is used to indicate long /a/ sounds in foreign names, particularly those of Arabic origin.

In some words there is a choice of whether to use a mater lectionis or not, and in modern printed texts matres lectionis are sometimes used even for short vowels (see Ktiv male), which is considered to be grammatically incorrect though instances are found as far back as Talmudic times. Spelling with matres lectionis is called male (full), while spelling without matres lectionis is called haser (defective). In Talmudic times texts from Palestine were noticeably more inclined to male spellings than texts from Babylonia: this may reflect the influence of Greek, which had full alphabetic spelling. Similarly in the Middle Ages Ashkenazim tended to use male spellings under the influence of European languages, while Sephardim tended to use haser spellings under the influence of Arabic.

Indicating stress

There is no one universally accepted sign for indicating stress in Hebrew texts. Usually stress is unmarked. In some vocalized texts, such as prayer books, when the stress is not on the last syllable it is marked with a small stroke placed underneath the first consonant of the stressed syllable to the left of the vowel mark (occasionally, as in Davidson's grammar, a different sign is used, to avoid confusion with meteg, see next paragraph). In vocalized Biblical texts stress is shown by the appropriate cantillation mark.

A secondary stress in a word may be marked with a vertical stroke, called a meteg (מתג), placed to the left of the vowel: this symbol is available in Unicode. Meteg is most usually found two syllables before the main stress: thus, when the following consonant carries a shva, it follows that that shva is a sounded one. (For example, the word ochlah, her food, is written in the same way as āchěla, she ate, but meteg on the first syllable shows that āchěla is intended.)

These signs are used, if at all, only in texts with niqqud.

See also

• Cantillation
• Hebrew alphabet
• Hebrew literature
• Niqqud (vowel pointing)
• Study of the Hebrew language
• Hebrew phonology
• Romanization of Hebrew
• Hebraization of English
• International Phonetic Alphabet for Hebrew
• Cursive Hebrew

References

• Hoffman, Joel M, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.
• Izre'el, Shlomo, "The emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew", in: Benjamin Hary (ed.), The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH): Working Papers I (2001)
• 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 0-521-55634-1
• Laufer, Asher. "Hebrew", in: Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press 1999. ISBN 0-521-65236-7, ISBN 0-521-63751-1.

External links

Hebrew Learning

• Hebrew on the Web - largest online Hebrew learning site - 2,200 pages

General

• Hebrew is Easy
• Ancient Hebrew Research Center Research and Learning Hebrew Resources

Dictionaries

• Root-based (Maskilon)
• Word-search English-Hebrew and Hebrew-English (Morfix)
• Hebrew-English (Maskilon)
• Hebrew-English (DAVAR freeware, English)
• Hebrew-English (Webster's Rosetta Edition)
• English-Hebrew (Maskilon)
• Collection of Hebrew bilingual dictionaries

History of the Hebrew language

• History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language, David Steinberg
• Short History of the Hebrew Language, Chaim Rabin
• Israeli Hebrew, David Tene
• Israel Language Policy and Linguistics, Haiim B. Rosén
• Words and their History, E. Y. Kutscher
• Hebrew Slang and Foreign Loan Words, Raphael Sappan
• Language in Time of Revolution, Benjamin Harshav
• Hebrew typography in German speaking regions

Complete texts in Hebrew

• Mechon Mamre - The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud (Babylonian and Palestinian), Tosefta, and Mishneh Torah
• Early Hebrew Newspapers Thousands of pages of mid- to late-19th-century and early 20th-century newspapers written in Hebrew and readable on line. Including contemporary accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg, the assassination of Czar Alexander II, the Dreyfus affair, etc.