Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Naama Zahavi-Ely <nxzaha AT wm.edu>]

>Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:41:31 -0700
>From: dwashbur AT nyx.net
>Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Chomsky and Hebrew
>To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
>Message-ID: <4A390EAB.1199.1387B4B4 AT dwashbur.nyx.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
>
>
>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

Actually, there is quite a number of people you can ask (or observe) at this 
point -- I am unusual among my own age group (over 50), but the younger 
generations are much more likely to be second, third, or even fourth 
generation Hebrew speakers in Israel nowadays.  I am suggesting not so much a 
change in the language as a change in its speakers (though the language has 
changed, of course).  There is a difference between learning a language 
directly (as one's first language) and learning it through another language 
(as a second language).  I would suggest that modern Hebrew is still very 
much a Semitic language, and has much more in common 
grammatically/structurally with  Biblical Hebrew than with, say, English or 
Yiddish.  I am not talking only of morphology but also of concepts and the 
language's manner of handling them.

Best wishes

Naama Zahavi-Ely