Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>]

there you go ...

from the mouth of the expert ....

in 10 a.d., it was hebrew ... not aramaic ... the living daily language
of ארץ ישראל ... for lower class, middle class and upper class hebrews ...
of all shapes and sizes.

beginning, middle and end ... .of story.

regards,

fred burlingame

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com> wrote:

>    Rivka,
>
>    Please understand that the good people here are
>  discussing a subject about which they hardly know
>  anything. And why should they? This list deals with
>  biblical Hebrew.
>
>    No one argues here that Hebrew was the normal day
>  to day discourse of people. Nevertheless, it is little
>  realized that this language served as means of
>  communications when Jews from different countries who
>  spoke different languages met.
>
>    It served as a means of communications about daily
>  matters  such as in the very rich Responsa literature;
>  it served in the middle ages as the means of creating
>   masterpieces of literature that have not lost their
>  freshness to this day. Sonnets were written in Hebrew
>  before they were in English.
>
>   This is not the venue for a detailed dicussion of
>  the subject. Let me end it with a citation of Shlomoh
>  Ben Maimon, who in the late 1700 wrote in Heb. on
>  the margin of something he studied: "I have a terrible
>  toothache".
>
>   I don't think anyone would use a dead language to
>  express this.
>
>   So whether this was a completely dead language, or
>  a somewhat dead language, or whatever, is of course
>  for Wikipedia to decide.
>
>
>  Uri Hurwitz                              Great Neck, NY
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Therefore, I'm not sure if anyone mentioned the book Ivrit Safa Meduberet
> ("Hebrew - A Spoken Language") by Shlomo Haramati, a professor at the
> Hebrew
> University. This slim, easy-read book, published in 2000, reviews the use
> of
> Hebrew throughout the generations and discusses/debunks the myth that
> Hebrew
> was a dead language that was "resurrected" by Ben-Yehuda.
>
>
>
> One of the points in this book is that while Ben-Yehuda's efforts and
> accomplishments in inventing new words and in making the daily use of
> Hebrew
> as a primary language are invaluable and are certainly acknowledged, it is
> incorrect to consider Hebrew a dead language.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>