Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

As you all probably know, this subject interests me very much.
Following up a statement
by Arie Schippers' in Hetzron's book The Semitic Languages, I
contacted Prof. Schippers
and via his colleague, Irene Zwiep, I was able to come by this
statement, by Eli ben
Yuhudah Hannazir, in Kitab Usul al-Lugha al-Ibraniyya ("Book of the
Foundations of the
Hebrew Language"), approximately from the 9th - 10th centuries, where
in the first page
known from the Cairo Genizah in its Arabic text, he writes:
"I would sit long hours in the town squares of Tiberias and its
villages, listening to the
speech of the simple and common folk, and studying the language and
its foundations,
and what they pronounced in the Hebrew language, and the Syriac language and 
its
kinds, that is, the language of the Targum and the rest, for it is
close to the Hebrew
language..."  Arie Schippers himself, as well as Irene Zwiep and
another scholar, don't
think that there was a spoken Hebrew tradition at that time, as there
should be more
evidence for it.

Yitzhak Sapir