Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

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