Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 1:41 AM, Dave Washburn wrote:

> 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.

> 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?

This regards Dave's earlier comment:
"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."

Ghilad Zuckerman quotes Chomsky to the effect that Hebrew
never died: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr09/tmr09013.htm
(quoting Chomsky's 1957 "Hebrew: The Eternal Language").
This statement of Chomsky goes at odds with the above
position.  Since Zuckerman's research is focused on this very
idea, I would have expected Zuckerman to mention it if
Chomsky in fact supported his position.

Regarding the comment itself, how would you prove (or disprove)
such a statement?  What is "more" and what is "less" and what
constitutes "common ground" with Indo European rather than
Semitic?

Olga Kapeliuk's article is also interesting in this regard, "Is
Modern Hebrew the only 'Indo-Europeanized' Semitic
Language?  And what about Neo-Aramaic?"  She notes,
among other things the influence of Old Persian on the verbal
system of 5th century BCE Aramaic.

http://books.google.com/books?id=wv2eBP9lPskC&pg=PA59

Yitzhak Sapir