[b-hebrew] Chomsky and Hebrew

Naama Zahavi-Ely nxzaha at wm.edu
Wed Jun 17 17:12:54 EDT 2009


With all due respect to Chomsky, may I suggest that he was writing at a time that (modern) Hebrew was spoken primarily by people who studied it as a second language?  This is no longer the case.  I am a third-generation native Hebrew speaker, and I can tell you that my sense of grammar and language is quite different from the Indo-European one.  

Obviously I am not claiming that modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are the same.  Neither are modern and Shakespearian English -- or, for that matter, everyday spoken and formal written English of our own time.

Best wishes

Naama Zahavi-Ely


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