Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

On 18 Jun 2009 at 21:30, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

> 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?


In context I believe he was speaking of grammar, and especially the way the 
modern
Hebrew verb system is tensed, among other factors.


> 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

So, does that mean you don't intend to answer my question?

Dave Washburn

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