[b-hebrew] Chomsky and Hebrew
Naama Zahavi-Ely
nxzaha at wm.edu
Thu Jun 18 17:28:31 EDT 2009
>Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:41:31 -0700
>From: dwashbur at nyx.net
>Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Chomsky and Hebrew
>To: b-hebrew at lists.ibiblio.org
>Message-ID: <4A390EAB.1199.1387B4B4 at dwashbur.nyx.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
>
>
>On 17 Jun 2009 at 17:12, Naama Zahavi-Ely wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>I wouldn't know about that, and obviously there aren't too many people we can ask. But are
>you suggesting that modern Hebrew has changed drastically enough in just three
>generations that it's now radically more semitic than it was when Chomsky wrote that
>comment?
>
>Dave Washburn
>
>http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
Actually, there is quite a number of people you can ask (or observe) at this point -- I am unusual among my own age group (over 50), but the younger generations are much more likely to be second, third, or even fourth generation Hebrew speakers in Israel nowadays. I am suggesting not so much a change in the language as a change in its speakers (though the language has changed, of course). There is a difference between learning a language directly (as one's first language) and learning it through another language (as a second language). I would suggest that modern Hebrew is still very much a Semitic language, and has much more in common grammatically/structurally with Biblical Hebrew than with, say, English or Yiddish. I am not talking only of morphology but also of concepts and the language's manner of handling them.
Best wishes
Naama Zahavi-Ely
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