How the History of Hebrew Has Helped My Learning
Modern Hebrew took a very long time to become the language it is today. It went through many prosperous times, and many times when the language seemed to be dying out. The majority of Hebrew stems back from Biblical Hebrew. The Torah was written in this language, and it is for that reason that Jews consider it a "holy" language. It only consisted of about 8,000 words, and was also used as the spoken language of Palestine. This period lasted until the 3rd Century BCE. Hebrew was then only used for written documents, such as the Mishna, until 200 CE. That period is called the Mishnaic period. During that time, those who had been speaking Hebrew had begun using Aramaic instead. Then during the Renaissance Medieval Hebrew existed. The language was rekindled by the enlightened, and words were being borrowed from Greek, Spanish, Arabic, among others. These new words were being formed from ancient Hebrew constructions, using old roots, while others were formed from foreign languages. After this time, Hebrew was dying out once again. It wasn't until Eliezer Ben-Yehuda helped to revive Hebrew that it became a spoken language again. The revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is the first and only time a written language developed to become spoken. It was because of the ideological association of Zionism, along with the pursuit for a State of Israel that Hebrew was revived. Interestingly enough, Hebrew is the only language that became an official language of a country, and the majority of people in that country were first generation speakers. Another important fact about the development of modern Hebrew is that geographically, it was revived among Yiddish speaking people. Had the language been revived among Arabic speaking Jews, it would have become much more Semitic and very different typologically. After the institutionalization of Modern Hebrew among Israelites, it became the official language of the country in the 40's and is still used today.
I think that understanding this development is important to learning Hebrew. It is important to understand where a language came from, and why it is the language it is today. For instance, much of the idiomatic words in modern Hebrew came from Yiddish, a Germanic language that developed from the same sources as English. I find this kind of thing fascinating because today, most Israelis speak English as a second language. Israel today is also comprised of a somewhat large minority of Arabic speaking Arabs. I'm sure that this conflict of languages has had an effect on the language Hebrew is today. It is also interesting to know that the majority of the structuring of modern Hebrew was created by one man. Modern Hebrew did not develop over 2,000 years to what it is today, but was created by academics to consist of the quality they wanted in the language. That is why modern Hebrew is still very similar to how it was written in the bible over 2,000 years ago.
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