Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

I believe it was William Chomsky who said that modern Hebrew has more in 
common with 
Indo-European languages than it does with any Semitic language, including 
ancient 
Hebrew.  While I'm not fluent in modern Hebrew, I have studied and read 
enough of it to 
believe he was correct.  That can be a major disadvantage.  When I was 
studying Koine 
Greek back in college, a fellow student was from either Crete or Cyprus (I 
forget which) and 
he found that his fluency in modern Greek kept tripping him up.  I can easily 
see the same 
thing happening with Hebrew.

On 15 Jun 2009 at 8:14, Moshe Shulman wrote:

> At 06:17 AM 6/15/2009, you wrote:
> >--- On Sun, 6/14/09, Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no> wrote:
> > > Because of their modern Hebrew background, it was
> > > not as easy for them to learn Biblical Hebrew (the
> > > subtleties of the language)
> >I would strongly disagree that modern Hebrew is any sort of obstacle 
> >to learning BH. I may or may not be alone in the following opinion, 
> >but Hebrew scholars who are not fluent in the modern Hebrew are at a 
> >serious disadvantage in this field.
> 
> Tony, I can only assume that you are not familiar with Modern Hebrew 
> or Biblical Hebrew. The differences are significant enough to be 
> problematic. I challenge anyone who knows only Biblical Hebrew to 
> read an Israeli paper (or one who knows only modern Hebrew to read a 
> Biblical or rabbinic text.) The problem is obvious and is much more 
> then just vocabulary. The only advantage is that you already know the 
> letter and vowel sounds, and feel 'comfortable'  with them.


Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur