Как на иврите пишется слово иврит

Русский[править]

Морфологические и синтаксические свойства[править]

ив—ри́т

Существительное, неодушевлённое, мужской род, 2-е склонение (тип склонения 1a– по классификации А. А. Зализняка); формы мн. ч. предположительны или неупотребимы.

Корень: -иврит- [Тихонов, 1996].

Произношение[править]

• МФА: ед. ч. [ɪˈvrʲit], мн. ч. [ɪˈvrʲitɨ]

Семантические свойства[править]

Значение[править]

1. лингв. еврейский язык, один из семитских языков, официальный язык государства Израиль, являющийся разговорным вариантом древнееврейского языка ◆ Все его мысли вот уже три года сосредоточены на отъезде в Израиль, учит иврит. Марк Поповский, «Семидесятые. Записки максималиста», 1971 г. [НКРЯ] ◆ На иврите говорил достаточно хорошо, хоть и с заметным акцентом. Д. И. Рубина, «Во вратах твоих», 1992 г. [НКРЯ]

Синонимы[править]

1. —

Антонимы[править]

1. —

Гиперонимы[править]

1. язык

Гипонимы[править]

1. —

Родственные слова[править]

Этимология[править]

От ивр. עברית «иврит», далее из עבר «переходить».

Перевод[править]

Библиография[править]

This article is about the Hebrew language in general. For the modern revived version as spoken in Israel, see Modern Hebrew.

Hebrew
עִבְרִית‎, Ivrit
Portion of the Isaiah Scroll, a second-century BCE manuscript of the Biblical Book of Isaiah and one of the best-preserved of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Pronunciation	Modern: [ivˈʁit][note 1] Tiberian: [ʕivˈriθ] Biblical: [ʕibˈrit]
Native to	Israel
Region	Land of Israel
Ethnicity	Israelites; Jews and Samaritans
Extinct	Mishnaic Hebrew extinct as a spoken language by the 5th century CE, surviving as a liturgical language along with Biblical Hebrew for Judaism[1][2][3]
Revival	Revived in the late 19th century CE. 9 million speakers of Modern Hebrew, of which 5 million are native speakers (2017)[4]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Hebrew
Early forms	Biblical Hebrew Mishnaic Hebrew Medieval Hebrew
Standard forms	Modern Hebrew
Writing system	Hebrew alphabet Hebrew Braille Paleo-Hebrew alphabet (Archaic Biblical Hebrew) Imperial Aramaic script (Late Biblical Hebrew) Samaritan script (Samaritan Biblical Hebrew)
Signed forms	Signed Hebrew (oral Hebrew accompanied by sign)[5]
Official status
Official language in	Israel (as Modern Hebrew)[6]
Recognised minority language in	Poland[7] South Africa[8]
Regulated by	Academy of the Hebrew Language האקדמיה ללשון העברית (ha-akademyah la-lashon ha-ʿivrit)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	he
ISO 639-2	heb
ISO 639-3	Variously: heb – Modern Hebrew hbo – Classical Hebrew (liturgical) smp – Samaritan Hebrew (liturgical) obm – Moabite (extinct) xdm – Edomite (extinct)
Glottolog	hebr1246
Linguasphere	12-AAB-a
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Hebrew (Hebrew alphabet: עִבְרִית‎, ʿĪvrīt, pronounced [ivˈʁit] (listen) or [ʕivˈrit] (listen); Samaritan script: ࠏࠁࠓࠉࠕ; Paleo-Hebrew script: 𐤏𐤁𐤓‫𐤉𐤕) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved throughout history as the main liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. Hebrew is the only Canaanite language still spoken today, and serves as the only truly successful example of a dead language that has been revived. It is also one of only two Northwest Semitic languages still in use, with the other being Aramaic.^[9][10]

The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE.^[11] Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Lashon Hakodesh (לָשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ‎‎, lit. ‘the holy tongue’ or ‘the tongue [of] holiness’) since ancient times. The language was not referred to by the name Hebrew in the Bible, but as Yehudit (transl. ’the language of Judah’) or Səpaṯ Kəna’an (transl. »the language of Canaan»).^{[1][note 2]} Mishnah Gittin 9:8 refers to the language as Ivrit, meaning Hebrew; however, Mishnah Megillah refers to the language as Ashurit, meaning Assyrian, which is derived from the name of the alphabet used, in contrast to Ivrit, meaning the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.^[12]

Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE, declining in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt that was carried out against the Roman Empire by the Jews of Judaea.^{[13][14][note 3]} Aramaic and, to a lesser extent, Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among societal elites and immigrants.^[16] Hebrew survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce and Jewish poetic literature. The first dated book printed in Hebrew was published by Abraham Garton in Reggio (Calabria, Italy) in 1475.^[17] With the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, the Hebrew language experienced a full-scale revival as a spoken and literary language, after which it became the main language of the Yishuv in Palestine and subsequently the lingua franca of the State of Israel with official status.

According to Ethnologue, Hebrew was spoken by five million people worldwide in 1998;^[4] in 2013, it was spoken by over nine million people worldwide.^[18] After Israel, the United States has the second-largest Hebrew-speaking population, with approximately 220,000 fluent speakers (see Israeli Americans and Jewish Americans).^[19] Modern Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel, while pre-revival forms of Hebrew are used for prayer or study in Jewish and Samaritan communities around the world today; the latter group utilizes the Samaritan dialect as their liturgical tongue. As a non-first language, it is studied mostly by non-Israeli Jews and students in Israel, by archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations, and by theologians in Christian seminaries.

Etymology[edit]

The modern English word «Hebrew» is derived from Old French Ebrau, via Latin from the Ancient Greek Ἑβραῖος (hebraîos) and Aramaic ‘ibrāy, all ultimately derived from Biblical Hebrew Ivri (עברי‎), one of several names for the Israelite (Jewish and Samaritan) people (Hebrews). It is traditionally understood to be an adjective based on the name of Abraham’s ancestor, Eber, mentioned in Genesis 10:21. The name is believed to be based on the Semitic root ʕ-b-r (עבר‎) meaning «beyond», «other side», «across»;^[20] interpretations of the term «Hebrew» generally render its meaning as roughly «from the other side [of the river/desert]»—i.e., an exonym for the inhabitants of the land of Israel and Judah, perhaps from the perspective of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia or Transjordan (with the river referred to being perhaps the Euphrates, Jordan or Litani; or maybe the northern Arabian Desert between Babylonia and Canaan).^[21] Compare the word Habiru or cognate Assyrian ebru, of identical meaning.^[22]

One of the earliest references to the language’s name as «Ivrit» is found in the prologue to the Book of Ben Sira,^{[note 4][clarification needed]} from the 2nd century BCE.^[23] The Hebrew Bible does not use the term «Hebrew» in reference to the language of the Hebrew people;^[24] its later historiography, in the Book of Kings, refers to it as ‏יְהוּדִית Yehudit «Judahite (language)».^[25]

History[edit]

Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages.^[26]

According to Avraham Ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE.^[27] Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic.

Hebrew was extinct as a colloquial language by Late Antiquity, but it continued to be used as a literary language, especially in Spain, as the language of commerce between Jews of different native languages, and as the liturgical language of Judaism, evolving various dialects of literary Medieval Hebrew, until its revival as a spoken language in the late 19th century.^[28][29]

Oldest Hebrew inscriptions[edit]

In July 2008, Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa that he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating from around 3,000 years ago.^[30] Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said that the inscription was «proto-Canaanite» but cautioned that «The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear,» and suggested that calling the text Hebrew might be going too far.^[31]

The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic period, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. Classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that, through the Greeks and Etruscans, later became the Roman script. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places in which later Hebrew spelling requires them.

Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example, Proto-Sinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from that of Egyptian. One ancient document is the famous Moabite Stone, written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Archaic Hebrew include the ostraca found near Lachish, which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE.

Classical Hebrew[edit]

Biblical Hebrew[edit]

In its widest sense, Biblical Hebrew refers to the spoken language of ancient Israel flourishing between the 10th century BCE and the turn of the 4th century CE.^[32] It comprises several evolving and overlapping dialects. The phases of Classical Hebrew are often named after important literary works associated with them.

• Archaic Biblical Hebrew, also called Old Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew, from the 10th to the 6th century BCE, corresponding to the Monarchic Period until the Babylonian exile and represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), notably the Song of Moses (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). It was written in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. A script descended from this, the Samaritan alphabet, is still used by the Samaritans.

• 

  Standard Biblical Hebrew, also called Biblical Hebrew, Early Biblical Hebrew, Classical Biblical Hebrew or Classical Hebrew (in the narrowest sense), around the 8th to 6th centuries BCE, corresponding to the late Monarchic period and the Babylonian exile. It is represented by the bulk of the Hebrew Bible that attains much of its present form around this time.

• Late Biblical Hebrew, from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BCE, corresponding to the Persian period and represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible, notably the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Basically similar to Classical Biblical Hebrew, apart from a few foreign words adopted for mainly governmental terms, and some syntactical innovations such as the use of the particle she- (alternative of «asher», meaning «that, which, who»). It adopted the Imperial Aramaic script (from which the modern Hebrew script descends).
• Israelian Hebrew is a proposed northern dialect of biblical Hebrew, believed to have existed in all eras of the language, in some cases competing with late biblical Hebrew as an explanation for non-standard linguistic features of biblical texts.

Early post-Biblical Hebrew[edit]

• Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, corresponding to the Hellenistic and Roman Periods before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and represented by the Qumran Scrolls that form most (but not all) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Commonly abbreviated as DSS Hebrew, also called Qumran Hebrew. The Imperial Aramaic script of the earlier scrolls in the 3rd century BCE evolved into the Hebrew square script of the later scrolls in the 1st century CE, also known as ketav Ashuri (Assyrian script), still in use today.
• Mishnaic Hebrew from the 1st to the 3rd or 4th century CE, corresponding to the Roman Period after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and represented by the bulk of the Mishnah and Tosefta within the Talmud and by the Dead Sea Scrolls, notably the Bar Kokhba letters and the Copper Scroll. Also called Tannaitic Hebrew or Early Rabbinic Hebrew.

Sometimes the above phases of spoken Classical Hebrew are simplified into «Biblical Hebrew» (including several dialects from the 10th century BCE to 2nd century BCE and extant in certain Dead Sea Scrolls) and «Mishnaic Hebrew» (including several dialects from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE and extant in certain other Dead Sea Scrolls).^[33] However, today most Hebrew linguists classify Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew as a set of dialects evolving out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew, thus including elements from both but remaining distinct from either.^[34]

By the start of the Byzantine Period in the 4th century CE, Classical Hebrew ceased as a regularly spoken language, roughly a century after the publication of the Mishnah, apparently declining since the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt around 135 CE.

Displacement by Aramaic[edit]

In the early 6th century BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the ancient Kingdom of Judah, destroying much of Jerusalem and exiling its population far to the east in Babylon. During the Babylonian captivity, many Israelites learned Aramaic, the closely related Semitic language of their captors. Thus, for a significant period, the Jewish elite became influenced by Aramaic.^[35]

After Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, he allowed the Jewish people to return from captivity.^[36][37] As a result,^{[improper synthesis?]} a local version of Aramaic came to be spoken in Israel alongside Hebrew. By the beginning of the Common Era, Aramaic was the primary colloquial language of Samarian, Babylonian and Galileean Jews, and western and intellectual Jews spoke Greek,^{[citation needed]} but a form of so-called Rabbinic Hebrew continued to be used as a vernacular in Judea until it was displaced by Aramaic, probably in the 3rd century CE. Certain Sadducee, Pharisee, Scribe, Hermit, Zealot and Priest classes maintained an insistence on Hebrew, and all Jews maintained their identity with Hebrew songs and simple quotations from Hebrew texts.^[15][38][39]

While there is no doubt that at a certain point, Hebrew was displaced as the everyday spoken language of most Jews, and that its chief successor in the Middle East was the closely related Aramaic language, then Greek,^{[38][note 3]} scholarly opinions on the exact dating of that shift have changed very much.^[14] In the first half of the 20th century, most scholars followed Abraham Geiger and Gustaf Dalman in thinking that Aramaic became a spoken language in the land of Israel as early as the beginning of Israel’s Hellenistic period in the 4th century BCE, and that as a corollary Hebrew ceased to function as a spoken language around the same time. Moshe Zvi Segal, Joseph Klausner and Ben Yehuda are notable exceptions to this view. During the latter half of the 20th century, accumulating archaeological evidence and especially linguistic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls has disproven that view. The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in 1946–1948 near Qumran revealed ancient Jewish texts overwhelmingly in Hebrew, not Aramaic.

The Qumran scrolls indicate that Hebrew texts were readily understandable to the average Israelite, and that the language had evolved since Biblical times as spoken languages do.^{[note 5]} Recent scholarship recognizes that reports of Jews speaking in Aramaic indicate a multilingual society, not necessarily the primary language spoken. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew co-existed within Israel as a spoken language.^[41] Most scholars now date the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman period, or about 200 CE.^[42] It continued on as a literary language down through the Byzantine period from the 4th century CE.

The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for the land of Israel. Hebrew functioned as the local mother tongue with powerful ties to Israel’s history, origins and golden age and as the language of Israel’s religion; Aramaic functioned as the international language with the rest of the Middle East; and eventually Greek functioned as another international language with the eastern areas of the Roman Empire.^{[citation needed]} William Schniedewind argues that after waning in the Persian period, the religious importance of Hebrew grew in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and cites epigraphical evidence that Hebrew survived as a vernacular language – though both its grammar and its writing system had been substantially influenced by Aramaic.^[43] According to another summary, Greek was the language of government, Hebrew the language of prayer, study and religious texts, and Aramaic was the language of legal contracts and trade.^[44] There was also a geographic pattern: according to Bernard Spolsky, by the beginning of the Common Era, «Judeo-Aramaic was mainly used in Galilee in the north, Greek was concentrated in the former colonies and around governmental centers, and Hebrew monolingualism continued mainly in the southern villages of Judea.»^[38] In other words, «in terms of dialect geography, at the time of the tannaim Palestine could be divided into the Aramaic-speaking regions of Galilee and Samaria and a smaller area, Judaea, in which Rabbinic Hebrew was used among the descendants of returning exiles.»^[15][39] In addition, it has been surmised that Koine Greek was the primary vehicle of communication in coastal cities and among the upper class of Jerusalem, while Aramaic was prevalent in the lower class of Jerusalem, but not in the surrounding countryside.^[44] After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE, Judaeans were forced to disperse. Many relocated to Galilee, so most remaining native speakers of Hebrew at that last stage would have been found in the north.^[45]

The Christian New Testament contains some Semitic place names and quotes.^[46] The language of such Semitic glosses (and in general the language spoken by Jews in scenes from the New Testament) is often referred to as «Hebrew» in the text,^[47] although this term is often re-interpreted as referring to Aramaic instead^{[note 6][note 7]} and is rendered accordingly in recent translations.^[49] Nonetheless, these glosses can be interpreted as Hebrew as well.^[50] It has been argued that Hebrew, rather than Aramaic or Koine Greek, lay behind the composition of the Gospel of Matthew.^[51] (See the Hebrew Gospel hypothesis or Language of Jesus for more details on Hebrew and Aramaic in the gospels.)

Mishnah and Talmud[edit]

The term «Mishnaic Hebrew» generally refers to the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud, excepting quotations from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects organize into Mishnaic Hebrew (also called Tannaitic Hebrew, Early Rabbinic Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew I), which was a spoken language, and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew II), which was a literary language. The earlier section of the Talmud is the Mishnah that was published around 200 CE, although many of the stories take place much earlier, and were written in the earlier Mishnaic dialect. The dialect is also found in certain Dead Sea Scrolls. Mishnaic Hebrew is considered to be one of the dialects of Classical Hebrew that functioned as a living language in the land of Israel. A transitional form of the language occurs in the other works of Tannaitic literature dating from the century beginning with the completion of the Mishnah. These include the halachic Midrashim (Sifra, Sifre, Mekhilta etc.) and the expanded collection of Mishnah-related material known as the Tosefta. The Talmud contains excerpts from these works, as well as further Tannaitic material not attested elsewhere; the generic term for these passages is Baraitot. The dialect of all these works is very similar to Mishnaic Hebrew.

About a century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew fell into disuse as a spoken language. The later section of the Talmud, the Gemara, generally comments on the Mishnah and Baraitot in two forms of Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which sometimes occurs in the text of the Gemara.

Hebrew was always regarded as the language of Israel’s religion, history and national pride, and after it faded as a spoken language, it continued to be used as a lingua franca among scholars and Jews traveling in foreign countries.^[52] After the 2nd century CE when the Roman Empire exiled most of the Jewish population of Jerusalem following the Bar Kokhba revolt, they adapted to the societies in which they found themselves, yet letters, contracts, commerce, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry and laws continued to be written mostly in Hebrew, which adapted by borrowing and inventing terms.

Medieval Hebrew[edit]

After the Talmud, various regional literary dialects of Medieval Hebrew evolved. The most important is Tiberian Hebrew or Masoretic Hebrew, a local dialect of Tiberias in Galilee that became the standard for vocalizing the Hebrew Bible and thus still influences all other regional dialects of Hebrew. This Tiberian Hebrew from the 7th to 10th century CE is sometimes called «Biblical Hebrew» because it is used to pronounce the Hebrew Bible; however, properly it should be distinguished from the historical Biblical Hebrew of the 6th century BCE, whose original pronunciation must be reconstructed. Tiberian Hebrew incorporates the scholarship of the Masoretes (from masoret meaning «tradition»), who added vowel points and grammar points to the Hebrew letters to preserve much earlier features of Hebrew, for use in chanting the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretes inherited a biblical text whose letters were considered too sacred to be altered, so their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters. The Syriac alphabet, precursor to the Arabic alphabet, also developed vowel pointing systems around this time. The Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible with the Masoretic pointing, was written in the 10th century, likely in Tiberias, and survives to this day. It is perhaps the most important Hebrew manuscript in existence.

During the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, important work was done by grammarians in explaining the grammar and vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew; much of this was based on the work of the grammarians of Classical Arabic. Important Hebrew grammarians were Judah ben David Hayyuj, Jonah ibn Janah, Abraham ibn Ezra^[53] and later (in Provence), David Kimhi. A great deal of poetry was written, by poets such as Dunash ben Labrat, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi, Moses ibn Ezra and Abraham ibn Ezra, in a «purified» Hebrew based on the work of these grammarians, and in Arabic quantitative or strophic meters. This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets.^[54]

The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to a distinct style of philosophical Hebrew. This is used in the translations made by the Ibn Tibbon family. (Original Jewish philosophical works were usually written in Arabic.^{[citation needed]}) Another important influence was Maimonides, who developed a simple style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code, the Mishneh Torah. Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and the Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud.

Hebrew persevered through the ages as the main language for written purposes by all Jewish communities around the world for a large range of uses—not only liturgy, but also poetry, philosophy, science and medicine, commerce, daily correspondence and contracts. There have been many deviations from this generalization such as Bar Kokhba’s letters to his lieutenants, which were mostly in Aramaic,^[55] and Maimonides’ writings, which were mostly in Arabic;^[56] but overall, Hebrew did not cease to be used for such purposes. For example, the first Middle East printing press, in Safed (modern Israel), produced a small number of books in Hebrew in 1577, which were then sold to the nearby Jewish world.^[57] This meant not only that well-educated Jews in all parts of the world could correspond in a mutually intelligible language, and that books and legal documents published or written in any part of the world could be read by Jews in all other parts, but that an educated Jew could travel and converse with Jews in distant places, just as priests and other educated Christians could converse in Latin. For example, Rabbi Avraham Danzig wrote the Chayei Adam in Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish, as a guide to Halacha for the «average 17-year-old» (Ibid. Introduction 1). Similarly, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s purpose in writing the Mishnah Berurah was to «produce a work that could be studied daily so that Jews might know the proper procedures to follow minute by minute». The work was nevertheless written in Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic, since, «the ordinary Jew [of Eastern Europe] of a century ago, was fluent enough in this idiom to be able to follow the Mishna Berurah without any trouble.»^[58]

Revival[edit]

Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany. In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate for commercial purposes. This Hebrew dialect was to a certain extent a pidgin.^[59] Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of the national revival (שיבת ציון, Shivat Tziyon, later Zionism), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language. Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time. Those languages were Jewish dialects of local languages, including Judaeo-Spanish (also called «Judezmo» and «Ladino»), Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and Bukhori (Tajiki), or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian, Persian and Arabic.

The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along the 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew. New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Ben-Yehuda) and older Aramaic and Latin. Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French. Modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921 (along with English and Arabic), and then in 1948 became an official language of the newly declared State of Israel. Hebrew is the most widely spoken language in Israel today.

In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary Hebrew tradition revived as the spoken language of modern Israel, called variously Israeli Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, New Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew, Standard Hebrew and so on. Israeli Hebrew exhibits some features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic.

The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Ha-Me’assef (The Gatherer), was published by maskilim in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) from 1783 onwards.^[60] In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. Hamagid, founded in Ełk in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language.

The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated in the late 19th century by the efforts of Ben-Yehuda. He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 immigrated to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora «shtetl» lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language. However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by different grammar and style, in the writings of people like Ahad Ha’am and others. His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into a gradually accepted movement. It was not, however, until the 1904–1914 Second Aliyah that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the more highly organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants. When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country’s three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion. A constructed modern language with a truly Semitic vocabulary and written appearance, although often European in phonology, was to take its place among the current languages of the nations.

While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous^[61] (because Hebrew was the holy language of the Torah and therefore some thought that it should not be used to discuss everyday matters), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of the British Mandate who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. After the establishment of Israel, it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The results of Ben-Yehuda’s lexicographical work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda Dictionary [he]). The seeds of Ben-Yehuda’s work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine. At the time, members of the Old Yishuv and a very few Hasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar, refused to speak Hebrew and spoke only Yiddish.

In the Soviet Union, the use of Hebrew, along with other Jewish cultural and religious activities, was suppressed. Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew «reactionary» since it was associated with Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the People’s Commissariat for Education as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself did not cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes^[62]). The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being the spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be treated as a foreign language.^[63] Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests,^[64] a policy of suppression of the teaching of Hebrew operated from the 1930s on. Later in the 1980s in the USSR, Hebrew studies reappeared due to people struggling for permission to go to Israel (refuseniks). Several of the teachers were imprisoned, e.g. Yosef Begun, Ephraim Kholmyansky, Yevgeny Korostyshevsky and others responsible for a Hebrew learning network connecting many cities of the USSR.

Modern Hebrew[edit]

Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation. However, the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native language and often introduced calques from Yiddish and phono-semantic matchings of international words.

Despite using Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation as its primary basis, modern Israeli Hebrew has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in some respects, mainly the following:

• the elimination of pharyngeal articulation in the letters chet (ח‎) and ayin ( ע‎) by most Hebrew speakers.
• the conversion of (ר‎) /r/ from an alveolar flap [ɾ] to a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] or uvular trill [ʀ], by most of the speakers, like in most varieties of standard German or Yiddish. see Guttural R
• the pronunciation (by many speakers) of tzere < ֵ ‎> as [eɪ] in some contexts (sifréj and téjša instead of Sephardic sifré and tésha)
• the partial elimination of vocal Shva < ְ ‎> (zmán instead of Sephardic zĕman)^[65]
• in popular speech, penultimate stress in proper names (Dvóra instead of Dĕvorá; Yehúda instead of Yĕhudá) and some other words^[66]
• similarly in popular speech, penultimate stress in verb forms with a second person plural suffix (katávtem «you wrote» instead of kĕtavtém).^{[note 8]}

The vocabulary of Israeli Hebrew is much larger than that of earlier periods. According to Ghil’ad Zuckermann:

The number of attested Biblical Hebrew words is 8198, of which some 2000 are hapax legomena (the number of Biblical Hebrew roots, on which many of these words are based, is 2099). The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20,000, of which (i) 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i.e. they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have a Hebrew form. Medieval Hebrew added 6421 words to (Modern) Hebrew. The approximate number of new lexical items in Israeli is 17,000 (cf. 14,762 in Even-Shoshan 1970 […]). With the inclusion of foreign and technical terms […], the total number of Israeli words, including words of biblical, rabbinic and medieval descent, is more than 60,000.^{[67]: 64–65}

In Israel, Modern Hebrew is currently taught in institutions called Ulpanim (singular: Ulpan). There are government-owned, as well as private, Ulpanim offering online courses and face-to-face programs.

Current status[edit]

Modern Hebrew is the primary official language of the State of Israel. As of 2013, there are about 9 million Hebrew speakers worldwide,^[68] of whom 7 million speak it fluently.^[69][70][71]

Currently, 90% of Israeli Jews are proficient in Hebrew, and 70% are highly proficient.^[72] Some 60% of Israeli Arabs are also proficient in Hebrew,^[72] and 30% report having a higher proficiency in Hebrew than in Arabic.^[18] In total, about 53% of the Israeli population speaks Hebrew as a native language,^[73] while most of the rest speak it fluently. In 2013 Hebrew was the native language of 49% of Israelis over the age of 20, with Russian, Arabic, French, English, Yiddish and Ladino being the native tongues of most of the rest. Some 26% of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and 12% of Arabs reported speaking Hebrew poorly or not at all.^[72][74]

Steps have been taken to keep Hebrew the primary language of use, and to prevent large-scale incorporation of English words into the Hebrew vocabulary. The Academy of the Hebrew Language of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem currently invents about 2,000 new Hebrew words each year for modern words by finding an original Hebrew word that captures the meaning, as an alternative to incorporating more English words into Hebrew vocabulary. The Haifa municipality has banned officials from using English words in official documents, and is fighting to stop businesses from using only English signs to market their services.^[75] In 2012, a Knesset bill for the preservation of the Hebrew language was proposed, which includes the stipulation that all signage in Israel must first and foremost be in Hebrew, as with all speeches by Israeli officials abroad. The bill’s author, MK Akram Hasson, stated that the bill was proposed as a response to Hebrew «losing its prestige» and children incorporating more English words into their vocabulary.^[76]

Hebrew is one of several languages for which the constitution of South Africa calls to be respected in their use for religious purposes.^[8] Also, Hebrew is an official national minority language in Poland, since 6 January 2005.^[7]

Phonology[edit]

Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic consonant inventory, with pharyngeal /ʕ ħ/, a series of «emphatic» consonants (possibly ejective, but this is debated), lateral fricative /ɬ/, and in its older stages also uvular /χ ʁ/. /χ ʁ/ merged into /ħ ʕ/ in later Biblical Hebrew, and /b ɡ d k p t/ underwent allophonic spirantization to [v ɣ ð x f θ] (known as begadkefat). The earliest Biblical Hebrew vowel system contained the Proto-Semitic vowels /a aː i iː u uː/ as well as /oː/, but this system changed dramatically over time.

By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, /ɬ/ had shifted to /s/ in the Jewish traditions, though for the Samaritans it merged with /ʃ/ instead.^[34] The Tiberian reading tradition of the Middle Ages had the vowel system /a ɛ e i ɔ o u ă ɔ̆ ɛ̆/, though other Medieval reading traditions had fewer vowels.

A number of reading traditions have been preserved in liturgical use. In Oriental (Sephardi and Mizrahi) Jewish reading traditions, the emphatic consonants are realized as pharyngealized, while the Ashkenazi (northern and eastern European) traditions have lost emphatics and pharyngeals (although according to Ashkenazi law, pharyngeal articulation is preferred over uvular or glottal articulation when representing the community in religious service such as prayer and Torah reading), and show the shift of /w/ to /v/. The Samaritan tradition has a complex vowel system that does not correspond closely to the Tiberian systems.

Modern Hebrew pronunciation developed from a mixture of the different Jewish reading traditions, generally tending towards simplification. In line with Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation, emphatic consonants have shifted to their ordinary counterparts, /w/ to /v/, and [ɣ ð θ] are not present. Most Israelis today also merge /ʕ ħ/ with /ʔ χ/, do not have contrastive gemination, and pronounce /r/ as a uvular fricative [ʁ] or a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] rather than an alveolar trill, because of Ashkenazi Hebrew influences. The consonants /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ have become phonemic due to loan words, and /w/ has similarly been re-introduced.

Consonants[edit]

Notes:

1. Proto-Semitic *ś was still pronounced as [ɬ] in Biblical Hebrew, but no letter was available in the Phoenician alphabet, so the letter ש‎ did double duty, representing both /ʃ/ and /ɬ/. Later on, however, /ɬ/ merged with /s/, but the old spelling was largely retained, and the two pronunciations of ש‎ were distinguished graphically in Tiberian Hebrew as שׁ‎ /ʃ/ vs. שׂ‎ /s/ < /ɬ/.
2. Biblical Hebrew as of the 3rd century BCE apparently still distinguished the phonemes ġ versus ʻ and ḫ versus ḥ, as witnessed by transcriptions in the Septuagint. As in the case of /ɬ/, no letters were available to represent these sounds, and existing letters did double duty: ח‎ for /χ/ and /ħ/ and ע‎ for /ʁ/ and /ʕ/. In all of these cases, however, the sounds represented by the same letter eventually merged, leaving no evidence (other than early transcriptions) of the former distinctions.
3. Hebrew and Aramaic underwent begadkefat spirantization at a certain point, whereby the stop sounds /b ɡ d k p t/ were softened to the corresponding fricatives [v ɣ ð x f θ] (written ḇ ḡ ḏ ḵ p̄ ṯ) when occurring after a vowel and not geminated. This change probably happened after the original Old Aramaic phonemes /θ, ð/ disappeared in the 7th century BCE,^[77] and most likely occurred after the loss of Hebrew /χ, ʁ/ c. 200 BCE.^{[note 9]} It is known to have occurred in Hebrew by the 2nd century.^[78] After a certain point this alternation became contrastive in word-medial and final position (though bearing low functional load), but in word-initial position they remained allophonic.^[79] In Modern Hebrew, the distinction has a higher functional load due to the loss of gemination, although only the three fricatives /v χ f/ are still preserved (the fricative /x/ is pronounced /χ/ in modern Hebrew). (The others are pronounced like the corresponding stops, as Modern Hebrew pronunciation was based on the Sephardic pronunciation which lost the distinction)

Grammar[edit]

Hebrew grammar is partly analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative and accusative using prepositional particles rather than grammatical cases. However, inflection plays a decisive role in the formation of verbs and nouns. For example, nouns have a construct state, called «smikhut», to denote the relationship of «belonging to»: this is the converse of the genitive case of more inflected languages. Words in smikhut are often combined with hyphens. In modern speech, the use of the construct is sometimes interchangeable with the preposition «shel», meaning «of». There are many cases, however, where older declined forms are retained (especially in idiomatic expressions and the like), and «person»-enclitics are widely used to «decline» prepositions.

Morphology[edit]

Like all Semitic languages, the Hebrew language exhibits a pattern of stems consisting typically of «triliteral», or 3-consonant consonantal roots, from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs are formed in various ways: e.g. by inserting vowels, doubling consonants, lengthening vowels and/or adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes. 4-consonant roots also exist and became more frequent in the modern language due to a process of coining verbs from nouns that are themselves constructed from 3-consonant verbs. Some triliteral roots lose one of their consonants in most forms and are called «Nakhim» (Resting).

Hebrew uses a number of one-letter prefixes that are added to words for various purposes. These are called inseparable prepositions or «Letters of Use» (Hebrew: אותיות השימוש, romanized: Otiyot HaShimush). Such items include: the definite article ha- (/ha/) (= «the»); prepositions be- (/be/) (= «in»), le- (/le/) (= «to»; a shortened version of the preposition el), mi- (/mi/) (= «from»; a shortened version of the preposition min); conjunctions ve- (/ve/) (= «and»), she- (/ʃe/) (= «that»; a shortened version of the Biblical conjunction asher), ke- (/ke/) (= «as», «like»; a shortened version of the conjunction kmo).

The vowel accompanying each of these letters may differ from those listed above, depending on the first letter or vowel following it. The rules governing these changes are hardly observed in colloquial speech as most speakers tend to employ the regular form. However, they may be heard in more formal circumstances. For example, if a preposition is put before a word that begins with a moving Shva, then the preposition takes the vowel /i/ (and the initial consonant may be weakened): colloquial be-kfar (= «in a village») corresponds to the more formal bi-khfar.

The definite article may be inserted between a preposition or a conjunction and the word it refers to, creating composite words like mé-ha-kfar (= «from the village»). The latter also demonstrates the change in the vowel of mi-. With be, le and ke, the definite article is assimilated into the prefix, which then becomes ba, la or ka. Thus *be-ha-matos becomes ba-matos (= «in the plane»). Note that this does not happen to mé (the form of «min» or «mi-» used before the letter «he»), therefore mé-ha-matos is a valid form, which means «from the airplane».

* indicates that the given example is grammatically non-standard.

Syntax[edit]

Like most other languages, the vocabulary of the Hebrew language is divided into verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and its sentence structure can be analyzed by terms like object, subject and so on.

• Though early Biblical Hebrew had a verb-subject-object ordering, this gradually transitioned to a subject-verb-object ordering. Many Hebrew sentences have several correct orders of words.^{[citation needed]}
• In Hebrew, there is no indefinite article.
• Hebrew sentences do not have to include verbs; the copula in the present tense is omitted. For example, the sentence «I am here» (אני פה ani po) has only two words; one for I (אני) and one for here (פה). In the sentence «I am that person» (אני הוא האדם הזה ani hu ha’adam ha’ze), the word for «am» corresponds to the word for «he» (הוא). However, this is usually omitted. Thus, the sentence (אני האדם הזה) is more often used and means the same thing.
• Negative and interrogative sentences have the same order as the regular declarative one. A question that has a yes/no answer begins with «האם» (ha’im, an interrogative form of ‘if’), but it is largely omitted in informal speech.
• In Hebrew there is a specific preposition (את et) for direct objects that would not have a preposition marker in English. The English phrase «he ate the cake» would in Hebrew be הוא אכל את העוגה hu akhal et ha’ugah (literally, «He ate את the cake»). The word את, however, can be omitted, making הוא אכל העוגה hu akhal ha’ugah («He ate the cake»). Former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was convinced that את should never be used as it elongates the sentence without adding meaning.
• In spoken Hebrew ‏את ה-‏ et ha- is also often contracted to ‏-תַ’‏ ta-, e.g. ת’אנשים ta-anashim instead of את האנשים et ha-anashim (the ‘ indicates non-standard use). This phenomenon has also been found by researchers in the Bar Kokhba documents^{[citation needed]} : מעיד אני עלי תשמים… שאני נותן תכבלים ברגליכם, writing תללו instead of את הללו, as well as תדקל and so on.

Writing system[edit]

Users of the language write Modern Hebrew from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet — an «impure» abjad, or consonant-only script, of 22 letters. The ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet resembles those used for Canaanite and Phoenician.^{[citation needed]} Modern scripts derive from the «square» letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive Hebrew script is used in handwriting: the letters tend to appear more circular in form when written in cursive, and sometimes vary markedly from their printed equivalents. The medieval version of the cursive script forms the basis of another style, known as Rashi script. When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letter representing the syllabic onset, or by use of matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels. Further diacritics may serve to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the consonants (e.g. bet/vet, shin/sin); and, in some contexts, to indicate the punctuation, accentuation and musical rendition of Biblical texts (see Hebrew cantillation).

Liturgical use in Judaism[edit]

Hebrew has always been used as the language of prayer and study, and the following pronunciation systems are found.

Ashkenazi Hebrew, originating in Central and Eastern Europe, is still widely used in Ashkenazi Jewish religious services and studies in Israel and abroad, particularly in the Haredi and other Orthodox communities. It was influenced by Yiddish pronunciation.

Sephardi Hebrew is the traditional pronunciation of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and Sephardi Jews in the countries of the former Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Yemenite Hebrew. This pronunciation, in the form used by the Jerusalem Sephardic community, is the basis of the Hebrew phonology of Israeli native speakers. It was influenced by Ladino pronunciation.

Mizrahi (Oriental) Hebrew is actually a collection of dialects spoken liturgically by Jews in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world. It was derived from the old Arabic language, and in some cases influenced by Sephardi Hebrew. Yemenite Hebrew or Temanit differs from other Mizrahi dialects by having a radically different vowel system, and distinguishing between different diacritically marked consonants that are pronounced identically in other dialects (for example gimel and «ghimel».)

These pronunciations are still used in synagogue ritual and religious study in Israel and elsewhere, mostly by people who are not native speakers of Hebrew. However, some traditionalist Israelis use liturgical pronunciations in prayer.

Many synagogues in the diaspora, even though Ashkenazi by rite and by ethnic composition, have adopted the «Sephardic» pronunciation in deference to Israeli Hebrew. However, in many British and American schools and synagogues, this pronunciation retains several elements of its Ashkenazi substrate, especially the distinction between tsere and segol.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

External links[edit]

Government[edit]

• Official website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language
• Ma’agarim – The Historical Dictionary Project by the Academy of the Hebrew Language
• Hebrew Phrases by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism

General information[edit]

• Hebrew language at the Jewish Encyclopedia
• A Guide to Hebrew at BBC Online
• A Short History of the Hebrew Language by Chaim Menachem Rabin
• Hebrew language at Curlie

Tutorials, courses and dictionaries[edit]

• Hebrew language at the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts
• Hebrew Basic Course by the Foreign Service Institute
• Phonetically Transcribed Modern Hebrew Course by Polyglot Daniel Epstein

This article is about the Hebrew language in general. For the modern revived version as spoken in Israel, see Modern Hebrew.

Hebrew
עִבְרִית‎, Ivrit
Portion of the Isaiah Scroll, a second-century BCE manuscript of the Biblical Book of Isaiah and one of the best-preserved of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Pronunciation	Modern: [ivˈʁit][note 1] Tiberian: [ʕivˈriθ] Biblical: [ʕibˈrit]
Native to	Israel
Region	Land of Israel
Ethnicity	Israelites; Jews and Samaritans
Extinct	Mishnaic Hebrew extinct as a spoken language by the 5th century CE, surviving as a liturgical language along with Biblical Hebrew for Judaism[1][2][3]
Revival	Revived in the late 19th century CE. 9 million speakers of Modern Hebrew, of which 5 million are native speakers (2017)[4]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Hebrew
Early forms	Biblical Hebrew Mishnaic Hebrew Medieval Hebrew
Standard forms	Modern Hebrew
Writing system	Hebrew alphabet Hebrew Braille Paleo-Hebrew alphabet (Archaic Biblical Hebrew) Imperial Aramaic script (Late Biblical Hebrew) Samaritan script (Samaritan Biblical Hebrew)
Signed forms	Signed Hebrew (oral Hebrew accompanied by sign)[5]
Official status
Official language in	Israel (as Modern Hebrew)[6]
Recognised minority language in	Poland[7] South Africa[8]
Regulated by	Academy of the Hebrew Language האקדמיה ללשון העברית (ha-akademyah la-lashon ha-ʿivrit)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	he
ISO 639-2	heb
ISO 639-3	Variously: heb – Modern Hebrew hbo – Classical Hebrew (liturgical) smp – Samaritan Hebrew (liturgical) obm – Moabite (extinct) xdm – Edomite (extinct)
Glottolog	hebr1246
Linguasphere	12-AAB-a
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Hebrew (Hebrew alphabet: עִבְרִית‎, ʿĪvrīt, pronounced [ivˈʁit] (listen) or [ʕivˈrit] (listen); Samaritan script: ࠏࠁࠓࠉࠕ; Paleo-Hebrew script: 𐤏𐤁𐤓‫𐤉𐤕) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved throughout history as the main liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. Hebrew is the only Canaanite language still spoken today, and serves as the only truly successful example of a dead language that has been revived. It is also one of only two Northwest Semitic languages still in use, with the other being Aramaic.^[9][10]

The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE.^[11] Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Lashon Hakodesh (לָשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ‎‎, lit. ‘the holy tongue’ or ‘the tongue [of] holiness’) since ancient times. The language was not referred to by the name Hebrew in the Bible, but as Yehudit (transl. ’the language of Judah’) or Səpaṯ Kəna’an (transl. »the language of Canaan»).^{[1][note 2]} Mishnah Gittin 9:8 refers to the language as Ivrit, meaning Hebrew; however, Mishnah Megillah refers to the language as Ashurit, meaning Assyrian, which is derived from the name of the alphabet used, in contrast to Ivrit, meaning the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.^[12]

Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE, declining in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt that was carried out against the Roman Empire by the Jews of Judaea.^{[13][14][note 3]} Aramaic and, to a lesser extent, Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among societal elites and immigrants.^[16] Hebrew survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce and Jewish poetic literature. The first dated book printed in Hebrew was published by Abraham Garton in Reggio (Calabria, Italy) in 1475.^[17] With the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, the Hebrew language experienced a full-scale revival as a spoken and literary language, after which it became the main language of the Yishuv in Palestine and subsequently the lingua franca of the State of Israel with official status.

According to Ethnologue, Hebrew was spoken by five million people worldwide in 1998;^[4] in 2013, it was spoken by over nine million people worldwide.^[18] After Israel, the United States has the second-largest Hebrew-speaking population, with approximately 220,000 fluent speakers (see Israeli Americans and Jewish Americans).^[19] Modern Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel, while pre-revival forms of Hebrew are used for prayer or study in Jewish and Samaritan communities around the world today; the latter group utilizes the Samaritan dialect as their liturgical tongue. As a non-first language, it is studied mostly by non-Israeli Jews and students in Israel, by archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations, and by theologians in Christian seminaries.

Etymology[edit]

The modern English word «Hebrew» is derived from Old French Ebrau, via Latin from the Ancient Greek Ἑβραῖος (hebraîos) and Aramaic ‘ibrāy, all ultimately derived from Biblical Hebrew Ivri (עברי‎), one of several names for the Israelite (Jewish and Samaritan) people (Hebrews). It is traditionally understood to be an adjective based on the name of Abraham’s ancestor, Eber, mentioned in Genesis 10:21. The name is believed to be based on the Semitic root ʕ-b-r (עבר‎) meaning «beyond», «other side», «across»;^[20] interpretations of the term «Hebrew» generally render its meaning as roughly «from the other side [of the river/desert]»—i.e., an exonym for the inhabitants of the land of Israel and Judah, perhaps from the perspective of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia or Transjordan (with the river referred to being perhaps the Euphrates, Jordan or Litani; or maybe the northern Arabian Desert between Babylonia and Canaan).^[21] Compare the word Habiru or cognate Assyrian ebru, of identical meaning.^[22]

One of the earliest references to the language’s name as «Ivrit» is found in the prologue to the Book of Ben Sira,^{[note 4][clarification needed]} from the 2nd century BCE.^[23] The Hebrew Bible does not use the term «Hebrew» in reference to the language of the Hebrew people;^[24] its later historiography, in the Book of Kings, refers to it as ‏יְהוּדִית Yehudit «Judahite (language)».^[25]

History[edit]

Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages.^[26]

According to Avraham Ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE.^[27] Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic.

Hebrew was extinct as a colloquial language by Late Antiquity, but it continued to be used as a literary language, especially in Spain, as the language of commerce between Jews of different native languages, and as the liturgical language of Judaism, evolving various dialects of literary Medieval Hebrew, until its revival as a spoken language in the late 19th century.^[28][29]

Oldest Hebrew inscriptions[edit]

In July 2008, Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa that he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating from around 3,000 years ago.^[30] Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said that the inscription was «proto-Canaanite» but cautioned that «The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear,» and suggested that calling the text Hebrew might be going too far.^[31]

The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic period, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. Classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that, through the Greeks and Etruscans, later became the Roman script. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places in which later Hebrew spelling requires them.

Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example, Proto-Sinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from that of Egyptian. One ancient document is the famous Moabite Stone, written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Archaic Hebrew include the ostraca found near Lachish, which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE.

Classical Hebrew[edit]

Biblical Hebrew[edit]

In its widest sense, Biblical Hebrew refers to the spoken language of ancient Israel flourishing between the 10th century BCE and the turn of the 4th century CE.^[32] It comprises several evolving and overlapping dialects. The phases of Classical Hebrew are often named after important literary works associated with them.

• Archaic Biblical Hebrew, also called Old Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew, from the 10th to the 6th century BCE, corresponding to the Monarchic Period until the Babylonian exile and represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), notably the Song of Moses (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). It was written in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. A script descended from this, the Samaritan alphabet, is still used by the Samaritans.

• 

  Standard Biblical Hebrew, also called Biblical Hebrew, Early Biblical Hebrew, Classical Biblical Hebrew or Classical Hebrew (in the narrowest sense), around the 8th to 6th centuries BCE, corresponding to the late Monarchic period and the Babylonian exile. It is represented by the bulk of the Hebrew Bible that attains much of its present form around this time.

• Late Biblical Hebrew, from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BCE, corresponding to the Persian period and represented by certain texts in the Hebrew Bible, notably the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Basically similar to Classical Biblical Hebrew, apart from a few foreign words adopted for mainly governmental terms, and some syntactical innovations such as the use of the particle she- (alternative of «asher», meaning «that, which, who»). It adopted the Imperial Aramaic script (from which the modern Hebrew script descends).
• Israelian Hebrew is a proposed northern dialect of biblical Hebrew, believed to have existed in all eras of the language, in some cases competing with late biblical Hebrew as an explanation for non-standard linguistic features of biblical texts.

Early post-Biblical Hebrew[edit]

• Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, corresponding to the Hellenistic and Roman Periods before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and represented by the Qumran Scrolls that form most (but not all) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Commonly abbreviated as DSS Hebrew, also called Qumran Hebrew. The Imperial Aramaic script of the earlier scrolls in the 3rd century BCE evolved into the Hebrew square script of the later scrolls in the 1st century CE, also known as ketav Ashuri (Assyrian script), still in use today.
• Mishnaic Hebrew from the 1st to the 3rd or 4th century CE, corresponding to the Roman Period after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and represented by the bulk of the Mishnah and Tosefta within the Talmud and by the Dead Sea Scrolls, notably the Bar Kokhba letters and the Copper Scroll. Also called Tannaitic Hebrew or Early Rabbinic Hebrew.

Sometimes the above phases of spoken Classical Hebrew are simplified into «Biblical Hebrew» (including several dialects from the 10th century BCE to 2nd century BCE and extant in certain Dead Sea Scrolls) and «Mishnaic Hebrew» (including several dialects from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE and extant in certain other Dead Sea Scrolls).^[33] However, today most Hebrew linguists classify Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew as a set of dialects evolving out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew, thus including elements from both but remaining distinct from either.^[34]

By the start of the Byzantine Period in the 4th century CE, Classical Hebrew ceased as a regularly spoken language, roughly a century after the publication of the Mishnah, apparently declining since the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt around 135 CE.

Displacement by Aramaic[edit]

In the early 6th century BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the ancient Kingdom of Judah, destroying much of Jerusalem and exiling its population far to the east in Babylon. During the Babylonian captivity, many Israelites learned Aramaic, the closely related Semitic language of their captors. Thus, for a significant period, the Jewish elite became influenced by Aramaic.^[35]

After Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, he allowed the Jewish people to return from captivity.^[36][37] As a result,^{[improper synthesis?]} a local version of Aramaic came to be spoken in Israel alongside Hebrew. By the beginning of the Common Era, Aramaic was the primary colloquial language of Samarian, Babylonian and Galileean Jews, and western and intellectual Jews spoke Greek,^{[citation needed]} but a form of so-called Rabbinic Hebrew continued to be used as a vernacular in Judea until it was displaced by Aramaic, probably in the 3rd century CE. Certain Sadducee, Pharisee, Scribe, Hermit, Zealot and Priest classes maintained an insistence on Hebrew, and all Jews maintained their identity with Hebrew songs and simple quotations from Hebrew texts.^[15][38][39]

While there is no doubt that at a certain point, Hebrew was displaced as the everyday spoken language of most Jews, and that its chief successor in the Middle East was the closely related Aramaic language, then Greek,^{[38][note 3]} scholarly opinions on the exact dating of that shift have changed very much.^[14] In the first half of the 20th century, most scholars followed Abraham Geiger and Gustaf Dalman in thinking that Aramaic became a spoken language in the land of Israel as early as the beginning of Israel’s Hellenistic period in the 4th century BCE, and that as a corollary Hebrew ceased to function as a spoken language around the same time. Moshe Zvi Segal, Joseph Klausner and Ben Yehuda are notable exceptions to this view. During the latter half of the 20th century, accumulating archaeological evidence and especially linguistic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls has disproven that view. The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in 1946–1948 near Qumran revealed ancient Jewish texts overwhelmingly in Hebrew, not Aramaic.

The Qumran scrolls indicate that Hebrew texts were readily understandable to the average Israelite, and that the language had evolved since Biblical times as spoken languages do.^{[note 5]} Recent scholarship recognizes that reports of Jews speaking in Aramaic indicate a multilingual society, not necessarily the primary language spoken. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew co-existed within Israel as a spoken language.^[41] Most scholars now date the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman period, or about 200 CE.^[42] It continued on as a literary language down through the Byzantine period from the 4th century CE.

The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for the land of Israel. Hebrew functioned as the local mother tongue with powerful ties to Israel’s history, origins and golden age and as the language of Israel’s religion; Aramaic functioned as the international language with the rest of the Middle East; and eventually Greek functioned as another international language with the eastern areas of the Roman Empire.^{[citation needed]} William Schniedewind argues that after waning in the Persian period, the religious importance of Hebrew grew in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and cites epigraphical evidence that Hebrew survived as a vernacular language – though both its grammar and its writing system had been substantially influenced by Aramaic.^[43] According to another summary, Greek was the language of government, Hebrew the language of prayer, study and religious texts, and Aramaic was the language of legal contracts and trade.^[44] There was also a geographic pattern: according to Bernard Spolsky, by the beginning of the Common Era, «Judeo-Aramaic was mainly used in Galilee in the north, Greek was concentrated in the former colonies and around governmental centers, and Hebrew monolingualism continued mainly in the southern villages of Judea.»^[38] In other words, «in terms of dialect geography, at the time of the tannaim Palestine could be divided into the Aramaic-speaking regions of Galilee and Samaria and a smaller area, Judaea, in which Rabbinic Hebrew was used among the descendants of returning exiles.»^[15][39] In addition, it has been surmised that Koine Greek was the primary vehicle of communication in coastal cities and among the upper class of Jerusalem, while Aramaic was prevalent in the lower class of Jerusalem, but not in the surrounding countryside.^[44] After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE, Judaeans were forced to disperse. Many relocated to Galilee, so most remaining native speakers of Hebrew at that last stage would have been found in the north.^[45]

The Christian New Testament contains some Semitic place names and quotes.^[46] The language of such Semitic glosses (and in general the language spoken by Jews in scenes from the New Testament) is often referred to as «Hebrew» in the text,^[47] although this term is often re-interpreted as referring to Aramaic instead^{[note 6][note 7]} and is rendered accordingly in recent translations.^[49] Nonetheless, these glosses can be interpreted as Hebrew as well.^[50] It has been argued that Hebrew, rather than Aramaic or Koine Greek, lay behind the composition of the Gospel of Matthew.^[51] (See the Hebrew Gospel hypothesis or Language of Jesus for more details on Hebrew and Aramaic in the gospels.)

Mishnah and Talmud[edit]

The term «Mishnaic Hebrew» generally refers to the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud, excepting quotations from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects organize into Mishnaic Hebrew (also called Tannaitic Hebrew, Early Rabbinic Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew I), which was a spoken language, and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew II), which was a literary language. The earlier section of the Talmud is the Mishnah that was published around 200 CE, although many of the stories take place much earlier, and were written in the earlier Mishnaic dialect. The dialect is also found in certain Dead Sea Scrolls. Mishnaic Hebrew is considered to be one of the dialects of Classical Hebrew that functioned as a living language in the land of Israel. A transitional form of the language occurs in the other works of Tannaitic literature dating from the century beginning with the completion of the Mishnah. These include the halachic Midrashim (Sifra, Sifre, Mekhilta etc.) and the expanded collection of Mishnah-related material known as the Tosefta. The Talmud contains excerpts from these works, as well as further Tannaitic material not attested elsewhere; the generic term for these passages is Baraitot. The dialect of all these works is very similar to Mishnaic Hebrew.

About a century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew fell into disuse as a spoken language. The later section of the Talmud, the Gemara, generally comments on the Mishnah and Baraitot in two forms of Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which sometimes occurs in the text of the Gemara.

Hebrew was always regarded as the language of Israel’s religion, history and national pride, and after it faded as a spoken language, it continued to be used as a lingua franca among scholars and Jews traveling in foreign countries.^[52] After the 2nd century CE when the Roman Empire exiled most of the Jewish population of Jerusalem following the Bar Kokhba revolt, they adapted to the societies in which they found themselves, yet letters, contracts, commerce, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry and laws continued to be written mostly in Hebrew, which adapted by borrowing and inventing terms.

Medieval Hebrew[edit]

After the Talmud, various regional literary dialects of Medieval Hebrew evolved. The most important is Tiberian Hebrew or Masoretic Hebrew, a local dialect of Tiberias in Galilee that became the standard for vocalizing the Hebrew Bible and thus still influences all other regional dialects of Hebrew. This Tiberian Hebrew from the 7th to 10th century CE is sometimes called «Biblical Hebrew» because it is used to pronounce the Hebrew Bible; however, properly it should be distinguished from the historical Biblical Hebrew of the 6th century BCE, whose original pronunciation must be reconstructed. Tiberian Hebrew incorporates the scholarship of the Masoretes (from masoret meaning «tradition»), who added vowel points and grammar points to the Hebrew letters to preserve much earlier features of Hebrew, for use in chanting the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretes inherited a biblical text whose letters were considered too sacred to be altered, so their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters. The Syriac alphabet, precursor to the Arabic alphabet, also developed vowel pointing systems around this time. The Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible with the Masoretic pointing, was written in the 10th century, likely in Tiberias, and survives to this day. It is perhaps the most important Hebrew manuscript in existence.

During the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, important work was done by grammarians in explaining the grammar and vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew; much of this was based on the work of the grammarians of Classical Arabic. Important Hebrew grammarians were Judah ben David Hayyuj, Jonah ibn Janah, Abraham ibn Ezra^[53] and later (in Provence), David Kimhi. A great deal of poetry was written, by poets such as Dunash ben Labrat, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi, Moses ibn Ezra and Abraham ibn Ezra, in a «purified» Hebrew based on the work of these grammarians, and in Arabic quantitative or strophic meters. This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets.^[54]

The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to a distinct style of philosophical Hebrew. This is used in the translations made by the Ibn Tibbon family. (Original Jewish philosophical works were usually written in Arabic.^{[citation needed]}) Another important influence was Maimonides, who developed a simple style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code, the Mishneh Torah. Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and the Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud.

Hebrew persevered through the ages as the main language for written purposes by all Jewish communities around the world for a large range of uses—not only liturgy, but also poetry, philosophy, science and medicine, commerce, daily correspondence and contracts. There have been many deviations from this generalization such as Bar Kokhba’s letters to his lieutenants, which were mostly in Aramaic,^[55] and Maimonides’ writings, which were mostly in Arabic;^[56] but overall, Hebrew did not cease to be used for such purposes. For example, the first Middle East printing press, in Safed (modern Israel), produced a small number of books in Hebrew in 1577, which were then sold to the nearby Jewish world.^[57] This meant not only that well-educated Jews in all parts of the world could correspond in a mutually intelligible language, and that books and legal documents published or written in any part of the world could be read by Jews in all other parts, but that an educated Jew could travel and converse with Jews in distant places, just as priests and other educated Christians could converse in Latin. For example, Rabbi Avraham Danzig wrote the Chayei Adam in Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish, as a guide to Halacha for the «average 17-year-old» (Ibid. Introduction 1). Similarly, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan’s purpose in writing the Mishnah Berurah was to «produce a work that could be studied daily so that Jews might know the proper procedures to follow minute by minute». The work was nevertheless written in Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic, since, «the ordinary Jew [of Eastern Europe] of a century ago, was fluent enough in this idiom to be able to follow the Mishna Berurah without any trouble.»^[58]

Revival[edit]

Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany. In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate for commercial purposes. This Hebrew dialect was to a certain extent a pidgin.^[59] Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of the national revival (שיבת ציון, Shivat Tziyon, later Zionism), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language. Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time. Those languages were Jewish dialects of local languages, including Judaeo-Spanish (also called «Judezmo» and «Ladino»), Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and Bukhori (Tajiki), or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian, Persian and Arabic.

The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along the 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew. New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Ben-Yehuda) and older Aramaic and Latin. Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French. Modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921 (along with English and Arabic), and then in 1948 became an official language of the newly declared State of Israel. Hebrew is the most widely spoken language in Israel today.

In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary Hebrew tradition revived as the spoken language of modern Israel, called variously Israeli Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, New Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew, Standard Hebrew and so on. Israeli Hebrew exhibits some features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic.

The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Ha-Me’assef (The Gatherer), was published by maskilim in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) from 1783 onwards.^[60] In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. Hamagid, founded in Ełk in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language.

The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated in the late 19th century by the efforts of Ben-Yehuda. He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 immigrated to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora «shtetl» lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language. However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by different grammar and style, in the writings of people like Ahad Ha’am and others. His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into a gradually accepted movement. It was not, however, until the 1904–1914 Second Aliyah that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the more highly organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants. When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country’s three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion. A constructed modern language with a truly Semitic vocabulary and written appearance, although often European in phonology, was to take its place among the current languages of the nations.

While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous^[61] (because Hebrew was the holy language of the Torah and therefore some thought that it should not be used to discuss everyday matters), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of the British Mandate who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. After the establishment of Israel, it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The results of Ben-Yehuda’s lexicographical work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda Dictionary [he]). The seeds of Ben-Yehuda’s work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine. At the time, members of the Old Yishuv and a very few Hasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar, refused to speak Hebrew and spoke only Yiddish.

In the Soviet Union, the use of Hebrew, along with other Jewish cultural and religious activities, was suppressed. Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew «reactionary» since it was associated with Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the People’s Commissariat for Education as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself did not cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes^[62]). The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being the spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be treated as a foreign language.^[63] Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests,^[64] a policy of suppression of the teaching of Hebrew operated from the 1930s on. Later in the 1980s in the USSR, Hebrew studies reappeared due to people struggling for permission to go to Israel (refuseniks). Several of the teachers were imprisoned, e.g. Yosef Begun, Ephraim Kholmyansky, Yevgeny Korostyshevsky and others responsible for a Hebrew learning network connecting many cities of the USSR.

Modern Hebrew[edit]

Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation. However, the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native language and often introduced calques from Yiddish and phono-semantic matchings of international words.

Despite using Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation as its primary basis, modern Israeli Hebrew has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in some respects, mainly the following:

• the elimination of pharyngeal articulation in the letters chet (ח‎) and ayin ( ע‎) by most Hebrew speakers.
• the conversion of (ר‎) /r/ from an alveolar flap [ɾ] to a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] or uvular trill [ʀ], by most of the speakers, like in most varieties of standard German or Yiddish. see Guttural R
• the pronunciation (by many speakers) of tzere < ֵ ‎> as [eɪ] in some contexts (sifréj and téjša instead of Sephardic sifré and tésha)
• the partial elimination of vocal Shva < ְ ‎> (zmán instead of Sephardic zĕman)^[65]
• in popular speech, penultimate stress in proper names (Dvóra instead of Dĕvorá; Yehúda instead of Yĕhudá) and some other words^[66]
• similarly in popular speech, penultimate stress in verb forms with a second person plural suffix (katávtem «you wrote» instead of kĕtavtém).^{[note 8]}

The vocabulary of Israeli Hebrew is much larger than that of earlier periods. According to Ghil’ad Zuckermann:

The number of attested Biblical Hebrew words is 8198, of which some 2000 are hapax legomena (the number of Biblical Hebrew roots, on which many of these words are based, is 2099). The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20,000, of which (i) 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i.e. they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have a Hebrew form. Medieval Hebrew added 6421 words to (Modern) Hebrew. The approximate number of new lexical items in Israeli is 17,000 (cf. 14,762 in Even-Shoshan 1970 […]). With the inclusion of foreign and technical terms […], the total number of Israeli words, including words of biblical, rabbinic and medieval descent, is more than 60,000.^{[67]: 64–65}

In Israel, Modern Hebrew is currently taught in institutions called Ulpanim (singular: Ulpan). There are government-owned, as well as private, Ulpanim offering online courses and face-to-face programs.

Current status[edit]

Modern Hebrew is the primary official language of the State of Israel. As of 2013, there are about 9 million Hebrew speakers worldwide,^[68] of whom 7 million speak it fluently.^[69][70][71]

Currently, 90% of Israeli Jews are proficient in Hebrew, and 70% are highly proficient.^[72] Some 60% of Israeli Arabs are also proficient in Hebrew,^[72] and 30% report having a higher proficiency in Hebrew than in Arabic.^[18] In total, about 53% of the Israeli population speaks Hebrew as a native language,^[73] while most of the rest speak it fluently. In 2013 Hebrew was the native language of 49% of Israelis over the age of 20, with Russian, Arabic, French, English, Yiddish and Ladino being the native tongues of most of the rest. Some 26% of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and 12% of Arabs reported speaking Hebrew poorly or not at all.^[72][74]

Steps have been taken to keep Hebrew the primary language of use, and to prevent large-scale incorporation of English words into the Hebrew vocabulary. The Academy of the Hebrew Language of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem currently invents about 2,000 new Hebrew words each year for modern words by finding an original Hebrew word that captures the meaning, as an alternative to incorporating more English words into Hebrew vocabulary. The Haifa municipality has banned officials from using English words in official documents, and is fighting to stop businesses from using only English signs to market their services.^[75] In 2012, a Knesset bill for the preservation of the Hebrew language was proposed, which includes the stipulation that all signage in Israel must first and foremost be in Hebrew, as with all speeches by Israeli officials abroad. The bill’s author, MK Akram Hasson, stated that the bill was proposed as a response to Hebrew «losing its prestige» and children incorporating more English words into their vocabulary.^[76]

Hebrew is one of several languages for which the constitution of South Africa calls to be respected in their use for religious purposes.^[8] Also, Hebrew is an official national minority language in Poland, since 6 January 2005.^[7]

Phonology[edit]

Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic consonant inventory, with pharyngeal /ʕ ħ/, a series of «emphatic» consonants (possibly ejective, but this is debated), lateral fricative /ɬ/, and in its older stages also uvular /χ ʁ/. /χ ʁ/ merged into /ħ ʕ/ in later Biblical Hebrew, and /b ɡ d k p t/ underwent allophonic spirantization to [v ɣ ð x f θ] (known as begadkefat). The earliest Biblical Hebrew vowel system contained the Proto-Semitic vowels /a aː i iː u uː/ as well as /oː/, but this system changed dramatically over time.

By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, /ɬ/ had shifted to /s/ in the Jewish traditions, though for the Samaritans it merged with /ʃ/ instead.^[34] The Tiberian reading tradition of the Middle Ages had the vowel system /a ɛ e i ɔ o u ă ɔ̆ ɛ̆/, though other Medieval reading traditions had fewer vowels.

A number of reading traditions have been preserved in liturgical use. In Oriental (Sephardi and Mizrahi) Jewish reading traditions, the emphatic consonants are realized as pharyngealized, while the Ashkenazi (northern and eastern European) traditions have lost emphatics and pharyngeals (although according to Ashkenazi law, pharyngeal articulation is preferred over uvular or glottal articulation when representing the community in religious service such as prayer and Torah reading), and show the shift of /w/ to /v/. The Samaritan tradition has a complex vowel system that does not correspond closely to the Tiberian systems.

Modern Hebrew pronunciation developed from a mixture of the different Jewish reading traditions, generally tending towards simplification. In line with Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation, emphatic consonants have shifted to their ordinary counterparts, /w/ to /v/, and [ɣ ð θ] are not present. Most Israelis today also merge /ʕ ħ/ with /ʔ χ/, do not have contrastive gemination, and pronounce /r/ as a uvular fricative [ʁ] or a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] rather than an alveolar trill, because of Ashkenazi Hebrew influences. The consonants /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ have become phonemic due to loan words, and /w/ has similarly been re-introduced.

Consonants[edit]

Notes:

1. Proto-Semitic *ś was still pronounced as [ɬ] in Biblical Hebrew, but no letter was available in the Phoenician alphabet, so the letter ש‎ did double duty, representing both /ʃ/ and /ɬ/. Later on, however, /ɬ/ merged with /s/, but the old spelling was largely retained, and the two pronunciations of ש‎ were distinguished graphically in Tiberian Hebrew as שׁ‎ /ʃ/ vs. שׂ‎ /s/ < /ɬ/.
2. Biblical Hebrew as of the 3rd century BCE apparently still distinguished the phonemes ġ versus ʻ and ḫ versus ḥ, as witnessed by transcriptions in the Septuagint. As in the case of /ɬ/, no letters were available to represent these sounds, and existing letters did double duty: ח‎ for /χ/ and /ħ/ and ע‎ for /ʁ/ and /ʕ/. In all of these cases, however, the sounds represented by the same letter eventually merged, leaving no evidence (other than early transcriptions) of the former distinctions.
3. Hebrew and Aramaic underwent begadkefat spirantization at a certain point, whereby the stop sounds /b ɡ d k p t/ were softened to the corresponding fricatives [v ɣ ð x f θ] (written ḇ ḡ ḏ ḵ p̄ ṯ) when occurring after a vowel and not geminated. This change probably happened after the original Old Aramaic phonemes /θ, ð/ disappeared in the 7th century BCE,^[77] and most likely occurred after the loss of Hebrew /χ, ʁ/ c. 200 BCE.^{[note 9]} It is known to have occurred in Hebrew by the 2nd century.^[78] After a certain point this alternation became contrastive in word-medial and final position (though bearing low functional load), but in word-initial position they remained allophonic.^[79] In Modern Hebrew, the distinction has a higher functional load due to the loss of gemination, although only the three fricatives /v χ f/ are still preserved (the fricative /x/ is pronounced /χ/ in modern Hebrew). (The others are pronounced like the corresponding stops, as Modern Hebrew pronunciation was based on the Sephardic pronunciation which lost the distinction)

Grammar[edit]

Hebrew grammar is partly analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative and accusative using prepositional particles rather than grammatical cases. However, inflection plays a decisive role in the formation of verbs and nouns. For example, nouns have a construct state, called «smikhut», to denote the relationship of «belonging to»: this is the converse of the genitive case of more inflected languages. Words in smikhut are often combined with hyphens. In modern speech, the use of the construct is sometimes interchangeable with the preposition «shel», meaning «of». There are many cases, however, where older declined forms are retained (especially in idiomatic expressions and the like), and «person»-enclitics are widely used to «decline» prepositions.

Morphology[edit]

Like all Semitic languages, the Hebrew language exhibits a pattern of stems consisting typically of «triliteral», or 3-consonant consonantal roots, from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs are formed in various ways: e.g. by inserting vowels, doubling consonants, lengthening vowels and/or adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes. 4-consonant roots also exist and became more frequent in the modern language due to a process of coining verbs from nouns that are themselves constructed from 3-consonant verbs. Some triliteral roots lose one of their consonants in most forms and are called «Nakhim» (Resting).

Hebrew uses a number of one-letter prefixes that are added to words for various purposes. These are called inseparable prepositions or «Letters of Use» (Hebrew: אותיות השימוש, romanized: Otiyot HaShimush). Such items include: the definite article ha- (/ha/) (= «the»); prepositions be- (/be/) (= «in»), le- (/le/) (= «to»; a shortened version of the preposition el), mi- (/mi/) (= «from»; a shortened version of the preposition min); conjunctions ve- (/ve/) (= «and»), she- (/ʃe/) (= «that»; a shortened version of the Biblical conjunction asher), ke- (/ke/) (= «as», «like»; a shortened version of the conjunction kmo).

The vowel accompanying each of these letters may differ from those listed above, depending on the first letter or vowel following it. The rules governing these changes are hardly observed in colloquial speech as most speakers tend to employ the regular form. However, they may be heard in more formal circumstances. For example, if a preposition is put before a word that begins with a moving Shva, then the preposition takes the vowel /i/ (and the initial consonant may be weakened): colloquial be-kfar (= «in a village») corresponds to the more formal bi-khfar.

The definite article may be inserted between a preposition or a conjunction and the word it refers to, creating composite words like mé-ha-kfar (= «from the village»). The latter also demonstrates the change in the vowel of mi-. With be, le and ke, the definite article is assimilated into the prefix, which then becomes ba, la or ka. Thus *be-ha-matos becomes ba-matos (= «in the plane»). Note that this does not happen to mé (the form of «min» or «mi-» used before the letter «he»), therefore mé-ha-matos is a valid form, which means «from the airplane».

* indicates that the given example is grammatically non-standard.

Syntax[edit]

Like most other languages, the vocabulary of the Hebrew language is divided into verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and its sentence structure can be analyzed by terms like object, subject and so on.

• Though early Biblical Hebrew had a verb-subject-object ordering, this gradually transitioned to a subject-verb-object ordering. Many Hebrew sentences have several correct orders of words.^{[citation needed]}
• In Hebrew, there is no indefinite article.
• Hebrew sentences do not have to include verbs; the copula in the present tense is omitted. For example, the sentence «I am here» (אני פה ani po) has only two words; one for I (אני) and one for here (פה). In the sentence «I am that person» (אני הוא האדם הזה ani hu ha’adam ha’ze), the word for «am» corresponds to the word for «he» (הוא). However, this is usually omitted. Thus, the sentence (אני האדם הזה) is more often used and means the same thing.
• Negative and interrogative sentences have the same order as the regular declarative one. A question that has a yes/no answer begins with «האם» (ha’im, an interrogative form of ‘if’), but it is largely omitted in informal speech.
• In Hebrew there is a specific preposition (את et) for direct objects that would not have a preposition marker in English. The English phrase «he ate the cake» would in Hebrew be הוא אכל את העוגה hu akhal et ha’ugah (literally, «He ate את the cake»). The word את, however, can be omitted, making הוא אכל העוגה hu akhal ha’ugah («He ate the cake»). Former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was convinced that את should never be used as it elongates the sentence without adding meaning.
• In spoken Hebrew ‏את ה-‏ et ha- is also often contracted to ‏-תַ’‏ ta-, e.g. ת’אנשים ta-anashim instead of את האנשים et ha-anashim (the ‘ indicates non-standard use). This phenomenon has also been found by researchers in the Bar Kokhba documents^{[citation needed]} : מעיד אני עלי תשמים… שאני נותן תכבלים ברגליכם, writing תללו instead of את הללו, as well as תדקל and so on.

Writing system[edit]

Users of the language write Modern Hebrew from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet — an «impure» abjad, or consonant-only script, of 22 letters. The ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet resembles those used for Canaanite and Phoenician.^{[citation needed]} Modern scripts derive from the «square» letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive Hebrew script is used in handwriting: the letters tend to appear more circular in form when written in cursive, and sometimes vary markedly from their printed equivalents. The medieval version of the cursive script forms the basis of another style, known as Rashi script. When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letter representing the syllabic onset, or by use of matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels. Further diacritics may serve to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the consonants (e.g. bet/vet, shin/sin); and, in some contexts, to indicate the punctuation, accentuation and musical rendition of Biblical texts (see Hebrew cantillation).

Liturgical use in Judaism[edit]

Hebrew has always been used as the language of prayer and study, and the following pronunciation systems are found.

Ashkenazi Hebrew, originating in Central and Eastern Europe, is still widely used in Ashkenazi Jewish religious services and studies in Israel and abroad, particularly in the Haredi and other Orthodox communities. It was influenced by Yiddish pronunciation.

Sephardi Hebrew is the traditional pronunciation of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and Sephardi Jews in the countries of the former Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Yemenite Hebrew. This pronunciation, in the form used by the Jerusalem Sephardic community, is the basis of the Hebrew phonology of Israeli native speakers. It was influenced by Ladino pronunciation.

Mizrahi (Oriental) Hebrew is actually a collection of dialects spoken liturgically by Jews in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world. It was derived from the old Arabic language, and in some cases influenced by Sephardi Hebrew. Yemenite Hebrew or Temanit differs from other Mizrahi dialects by having a radically different vowel system, and distinguishing between different diacritically marked consonants that are pronounced identically in other dialects (for example gimel and «ghimel».)

These pronunciations are still used in synagogue ritual and religious study in Israel and elsewhere, mostly by people who are not native speakers of Hebrew. However, some traditionalist Israelis use liturgical pronunciations in prayer.

Many synagogues in the diaspora, even though Ashkenazi by rite and by ethnic composition, have adopted the «Sephardic» pronunciation in deference to Israeli Hebrew. However, in many British and American schools and synagogues, this pronunciation retains several elements of its Ashkenazi substrate, especially the distinction between tsere and segol.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

External links[edit]

Government[edit]

• Official website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language
• Ma’agarim – The Historical Dictionary Project by the Academy of the Hebrew Language
• Hebrew Phrases by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism

General information[edit]

• Hebrew language at the Jewish Encyclopedia
• A Guide to Hebrew at BBC Online
• A Short History of the Hebrew Language by Chaim Menachem Rabin
• Hebrew language at Curlie

Tutorials, courses and dictionaries[edit]

• Hebrew language at the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts
• Hebrew Basic Course by the Foreign Service Institute
• Phonetically Transcribed Modern Hebrew Course by Polyglot Daniel Epstein

Многие изучающие алфавит иврита спрашивают, как правильно написать свое имя и фамилию, а также  название страны и города, где они родились.
Мы предлагаем вам воспользоваться нашей таблицей соответствий
букв русского языка и иврита. Ниже вы найдете также несколько важных правил, которые нужно учитывать.

Несколько важных правил:

• В языке иврит буквы не удваиваются. Например, как в имени Анна — אנה или Элла — אלה
• В именах, где следуют подряд две гласные, между ними добавляется буква Алеф — א, как в именах:
  Леонид — לאוניד,  Зинаида  — זינאידה,  Таиса- טאיסה
• Если имя или фамилия имеет окончание -ИЙ, то пишется одна буква Йуд -י. Например:  Юрий -יורי , Подольский -פודולסקי
• Если слово заканчивается на гласную А или Э, то на конце всегда пишется hей — ה.
• Имена и названия, происходящие из Танаха пишутся в том же виде, как и в источнике. Это означает, что в них не добавляют буквы Вав — ו и Йуд — י. Например: Иерусалим- ירושלים, Соломон (Шломо) — שלמה, Наоми — נעמי,  Моисей (Моше) — משה, Яаков — יעקב.
  Мы предлагаем Вам скачать словарь Еврейские имена на иврите
• Сначала пишется имя, а потом фамилия. Например: בנימין נתניהו
• Есть также несколько особенностей написания названий и имен из других семитских языков, такие слова нужно просто запомнить. Например, Ирак начинается с буквы Аин — עיראק под влиянием написания этого слова в арабском языке.

Пишите свое имя, фамилию и названия на иврите грамотно!

Продолжаю писать про иврит. В этой части расскажу как же они все-таки пишут, не имея в алфавите ни одной гласной. В следующей части расскажу самую изюминку иврита, гортанные немые буквы и точки-умлауты.
Итак….

Иврит для тех, кто его никогда не будет учить III

Как я уже сказал в алфавите иврита отсутствуют гласные буквы. Многие считают, что в письме на иврите гласные не пишутся, другие не верят…   Сейчас я расскжу как им это удается и на фига им это надо.

I. ПРАВИЛА ЧТЕНИЯ

1. Звуки «а» и «е«

Сразу расмотрю пример. Допустим нам надо написать слово «Сахар» Как бы оно выглядело на письменном иврите…

Или то же самое ивритскими буквами

То, что у меня выделено синим-само слово. То, что выделено красным-называется огласовки
Т.е. читается любое слово следующим образом: Буква-огласовка, буква-огласовка. Как бы сверху вниз.

То же самое, например, с другими словами: Телец, кебаб и гамак

Ивритскими буквами это бы выглядело примееерно так:
טֶלֶץ קֶבָב גָמָק

Маленькие точки под буквами это и есть гласные.
Но. Вся соль в том, что эти точки пишут только в букваре, религиозной литературе, и в непонятных иностранных словах. Я спрашивал у инсайдеров, многие даже толком не знают как читаются эти точечки и черточки, а тем более их названия. Поэтому слова: сахар, телец, кебаб, гамак в нормальном письме выглядели бы так(конечно если бы евреи пользовались кириллицей)

СХР, ТЛЦ, КББ, ГМК

Здесь стоит еще упомянуть, что в иврите нет больших и маленьких букв. Все одинаковые. Еще в иврите все друг к другу обращаются на «ты», ибо слово «вы» у них обозначает только множественное число.

Т.е в реальной жизни гласные звуки «е» и «а» на письме никак не обозначаются!

2. Звук «и«

Звук «и» на письме очень часто обозначается согласной буквой «Й» и огласовкой, если письмо ограсованое. Например слово «Ситец«:

Или ивритскими буквами примерно так: סִיטֶץ

Без огласовок  слово «ситец» писалось бы писалось бы СЙТЦ

По моим оценкам звук «и» передается на письме примерно в 50% случаев.

3. Звуки «о» и «у«

Звуки «о» и «у» на письме передаются хитро. С помощью другой согласной буквы. Эта буква «в», которая выглядит как простая черта сверху вниз. В зависимости от того где в букве «в» стоит точка-эта буква читается как «о» или как «у»
О=וֹ
У=וּ

В итоге слово «молоко» бы выглядело так:

или в неогласованном письме: МВЛВКВ а ивритскими буквами מוֹלוֹקוֹ

А слово «мусор» —  МВ·СВ·Р или в неогласованном письме МВСВР, а ивритскими буквами — מוּסוֹר

Необходимо упомянуть, что такое написание звуков «и», «о», «у» — не является единственно возможным. Для них существуют также специальные значки, как для «а» и «е». В некоторых словах буква В или Й не пишется. Почему? …чуть позже.

4. Гласный звук в начале слова.

Как же тогда быть если слово начинается с гласного? А очень просто! Если звук «и» и слово ивритское, то пишется просто буква «Й». Например: ЙЦХК РБЙН=Йицхак Рабин. А если не «и»?
В иврите существует 3 «немых» буквы. Это всем известная Алеф, буква «Айн» и буква h. Эти буквы читаются примерно как «Ъ» в кириллице. То же самое происходит, если в слове идут подряд 2 гласных. Например:

Ариэль=ЪРЙЪЛ=אריעל =אָרִיעֶל , где зеленым цветом обозначены немые буквы ивритского алфавита. Они не читаются, и выполняют примерно такую же роль, как твердый знак в русском языке.

Изначально гласных в начале слова не было не было. Незаимствованные слова, которые в современном произношении начинаются с гласного звука, на письме начинаются с букв «алеф» или «аин» и «hэй». Звуки, обозначаемые этими буквами, когда-то произносились. «Аин» и сейчас произносят многие сефарды, особенно пожилые, «hэй» тоже многие произносят.

Для написания заимствованных слов, начинающихся на гласный звук, используют букву «алеф»: например, Ольга — אולגה, Ирина — אירינה, Алекс — אלקס, Эдуард — אדוארד.

II. СЛОВООБРАЗОВАНИЕ.

Зачем же все это нужно??? Зачем нужно пропускать гласные, придумывать «немые» буквы и усложнять себе жизнь?
Все дело в строении иврита. Если мы еще раз посмотрим на слово «Сахар», то увидим следующее:

Так пишется «Сахар» в огласованном письме. Из чего состоит это слово?

СХР — это корень слова. Корень в иврите обычно-три согласных буквы. А вот это называется формой слова:

Т.е. все слова иврита-это множество корней, перемноженое на множество форм. С точки зрения иврита слова:

Сахар, Сохер, Сихур, Схара, Сахара, Сихра итп. — однокоренные слова. Корень один-формы разные.

Как устроен иврит? Есть к примеру корень «МТК» Достаточно знать, что этот корень имеет отношения к глаголу «сластить». Если же попадается слово, которое абсолютно иначе звучит, но содеоржит в корне эти 3 буквы, то по форме можно догадаться что оно означает. К примеру

 В русском языке я нашел похожее явление со словами, которые похоже строятся тоже по такому же принципу, но  по правилам не являются однокоренными. — хранилище, схоронить, сохранить,  похороны, хронометр. Возможно все эти слова происходят от греческого «Хронос«=время.

Иври́т (עִבְרִית (современное произношение (инф.) ivə’ʁit)) — «еврейский язык») — язык семитской семьи, государственный язык Израиля, язык некоторых еврейских общин и диаспор; древняя форма иврита (иногда называемая древнееврейским языком) — традиционный язык иудаизма. Современный иврит возрождён и адаптирован как разговорный и официальный язык Государства Израиль в XX веке.

Происхождение и возраст

Между XIII и VII веком до н. э. иврит становится самостоятельным семитским языком, окончательно отделившись от близкородственных ему западносемитских идиомов. Наиболее древний литературный источник на иврите из обнаруженных к настоящему времени — «Песнь Деворы» (XII век до н. э.), которая входит в состав Ветхого Завета (Суд.5). Самая древняя надпись на иврите, «календарь из Гезера», датируется X веком до н. э.

С точки зрения ортодоксального иудаизма иврит является божественным языком, на котором говорил первый человек. ^{[источник не указан 728 дней]}

Этапы развития

Древнееврейский язык

Библейский период (XII—II вв. до н. э.)

Источник:

• Ветхий Завет (он же Тана́х — «Тора, Невиим, Ктувим»).

Особенности: грамматика и фонетика всё ещё сохраняют черты, традиционные для семитских языков. Гласные делятся на ультракраткие, краткие и долгие.

Послебиблейский период (I век до н. э. — II век н. э.)

Источники:

• Мишна́ (свод законов иудаизма (Устный Закон))
• Кумранские рукописи (раскопки в районе Мёртвого моря в 1940-х годах)

К концу II века н. э. древнееврейский перестаёт быть разговорным языком, оставаясь языком богослужения.

Древнееврейский язык эпохи Талмуда и Масоретов (III—V вв.)

Источники:

• пию́т (религиозная поэзия на иврите)
• Мидраши (комментарии и толкования Ветхого Завета)

В это время в одном из течений еврейской религии, называющем себя «масо́реты» («хранители традиций»), изобретают систему «гласных» значков при «согласных» буквах («некудо́т»). Это позволяет стандартизировать произношение гласных при чтении древних ивритских текстов.

Иврит значительно обогащается арамейской лексикой (этот процесс продолжается и в средневековую эпоху). Происходит перестройка системы глагола — прежние виды (совершенный и несовершенный) переосмысливаются; в результате перестройки системы глагольных времён некоторые «качественные» причастия становятся самостоятельными словами.

Средневековый иврит (X—XVIII вв.)

Источники:

• испанская поэзия (Йегуда Галеви, Ибн-Эзра, Ибн-Гебироль, Альхаризи)
• комментарии к Библии и Талмуду (Раши, Маймонид, Нахманид)
• каббалистическая литература
• научная литература (философская, медицинская, географическая, филологическая, историческая)

Иврит не является разговорным языком, однако евреи по-прежнему изучают его, читают на нём религиозные книги, пишут труды, общаются с евреями из других стран. Выходит из употребления основной «конкурент» иврита — арамейский язык. Вырабатывается несколько произносительных норм иврита: ашкеназская (Европа — кроме Испании), сефардская (в основном в исламских странах, Испании, Греции, частично в Италии), йеменская. Сефардская норма лучше сохраняет особенности древнего произношения, однако в ней утрачено различие между краткими и долгими гласными. Ашкеназская норма приобретает некоторые особенности немецкого произношения; долгие гласные превращаются в йотированные, происходит существенная перестройка системы гласных и согласных. Имя прилагательное окончательно становится самостоятельной частью речи.

Интересно, что в XVII веке в европейской филологии господствовала теория о родстве финского языка и иврита^[3].

Иврит XIX века

Литература на иврите становится частью европейской культуры.

Источники:

• Газеты и журналы на иврите.
• Романы, рассказы, пьесы, новеллы и т. п. (например, книги Менделе Мойхер-Сфорима).
• Школьные учебники по всем предметам образования.

Возрождённый иврит (с начала XX века)

Язык, считавшийся мёртвым в течение 18 столетий, становится языком повседневного общения, государственным языком Государства Израиль. Это стало возможным благодаря усилиям ряда энтузиастов, самый известный из которых — Элиэзер Бен-Йегуда.

Идея возрождения иврита была неотъемлемой частью идеологии сионизма как таковой, стремившейся порвать с наследием диаспоры и с языками, на которых говорили евреи, жившие под чуждым владычеством. Показательными в связи с этим представляются слова, сказанные в 1935 году Хаимом Вейцманом — ученым, либералом, европейским интеллектуалом и будущим первым президентом Израиля: «Мы приехали в Эрец-Исраэль не для того, чтобы копировать жизнь Варшавы, Пинска и Лондона. Сущность сионизма — изменение всех ценностей, которые евреи усвоили под давлением чужих культур».

Прошло более ста лет с тех пор, как Союз взаимопомощи немецких евреев (Хильфсферайн) основал в 1904 г. первую в Иерусалиме учительскую семинарию для преподавателей иврита, и с момента открытия в 1905 г. в Яффо гимназии «Герцлия» — первой в мире средней школы, в которой преподавание велось на иврите. Главным залогом успеха стал добровольный (а иногда и принудительный) выбор иврита как языка повседневного общения в семьях репатриантов второй и третьей волны, прибывших в Эрец-Исраэль в первой четверти XX века, в киббуцах и сельскохозяйственных поселениях.

В первые годы существования Государства Израиль политика внедрения иврита носила исключительно жёсткий характер. В дальнейшем, когда иврит окончательно вытеснил другие еврейские языки, отношение к этим языкам со стороны еврейского государства значительно смягчилось. В 1996 году были приняты законы о сохранении культурного наследия на идише и ладино.

Возрождение иврита

Обогащение языка происходит также и в настоящее время, усилиями учёных Академии языка иврит в Иерусалиме. Происходит это следующими способами:

1. Изменение значения древних слов

Примеры:

• Слово анива́ (עניבה) означало особый бант ещё в Мишне (II век), а затем и в Средние века (встречается у Маймонида). Теперь это галстук.
• Слово алуф (אלוף) обозначало в древности «племенной военачальник, тысячник» от слова э́леф (אלף = тысяча), теперь — это воинское звание «генерал», а также «чемпион».

2. Образование новых слов от существующих в языке корней по законам ивритской грамматики (то есть до этого такого слова не существовало) и по аналогии с уже существовавшими словами.

Пример:

• маХШе́В (מחשב)= компьютер

(буквально: «вычислитель», от основы ХиШеВ (חישב = (он) вычислял)

по аналогии со старыми словами

• Мазле́г (מזלג) = «вилка»,
• Мазре́к (מזרק) = «шприц» и т. д.

3. Особенность языка — «сопряжённая конструкция», словосочетание из двух или более существительных (смиху́т), при этом первое слово иногда изменяется по определённым фонетическим законам (эта форма называется нисма́х).

Пример:

• Бейт-се́фер (בית-ספר) — «школа», от ба́ит (בית = дом) +се́фер (ספר = книга)
• Шем-мишпаха́ (שם משפחה) — «фамилия», от шем (שם = имя) + мишпаха (משפחה = семья)
• Бат-Ям (בת-ים) — «дочь моря», «русалка» от бат (בת = дочь) + ям (ים = море)
• Купа́т-холи́м (קופת חולים) — «поликлиника» от купа́ (קופה = касса) + холи́м (חולים — больные (мн. ч.)).

Иногда такие словосочетания превращаются в одно слово.

Например:

• кадуре́гель (כדורגל) — «футбол» (каду́р (כדור) = мяч, ре́гель (רגל) = нога)
• мигдало́р (מגדלור) — «маяк» (мигда́ль (מגדל) = башня, ор (אור) = свет)

4. Сложносокращённые слова (как в русском языке вуз, колхоз или КПСС)

Между предпоследней и последней буквами сложносокращённых слов обычно ставится двойной апостроф («).

Примеры:

• имя учёного Раши — Рабейну Шломо Ицхаки (רש»י= наш учитель Соломон сын Исаака)
• слово тапу́з (תפוז= апельсин) произошло от слияния двух слов: «тапу́ах» и «заха́в» (дословно = золотое яблоко)
• название Ветхого Завета по-еврейски — Танах (תנ»ך), что расшифровывается как Тора, Невиим, Кетувим, то есть «Пятикнижие, Пророки, Писания»

5. Заимствование иностранных слов

Примеры: те́лефон (טלפון), униве́рсита (אוניברסיטה), о́тобус (אוטובוס), я́нуар (ינואר) и т. п.

Иврит в СССР

Уже в 1919 году постановлением СНК иврит в РСФСР был объявлен религиозным языком, и преподавание на нём в еврейских школах запрещено. Последнее художественное издание на иврите было осуществлено в 1927 году — книга Б. Фрадкина «Алей асор» («На десятиструнной лире»), после чего на нём время от времени издавались лишь религиозные материалы (календари, молитвенники) для общинных нужд.

В советской литературе иврит очень долго называли «древнееврейским», даже когда вопрос его возрождения в Израиле был исторически решён — скорее всего, из чисто политических соображений, с целью противопоставления «старого и мёртвого» языка иврит «современному и живому» еврейскому языку — идишу. Нейтральное отношение к современному ивриту в СССР имело место между смертью Сталина в 1953 г. и Шестидневной войной в 1967 г., когда между Израилем и СССР существовали дипломатические отношения. В 1963 году был издан «Иврит-русский словарь» Ф. Л. Шапиро, содержащий также обширный грамматический очерк Б. Я. Гранде и впоследствии использовавшийся при нелегальном изучении иврита в 1960-1980-е годы. Был издан сборник «Поэзия Израиля», куда были включены и переводы с иврита. Советские библиотеки получали в этот период некоторые издававшиеся в Израиле книги на иврите. Однако и в это время обучение ивриту в СССР практически отсутствовало.

После Шестидневной войны и разрыва советско-израильских отношений в 1967 г. преподающие и изучающие (за исключением немассового научного изучения, например, на востоковедческих отделениях университетов) иврит в СССР приравнивались к сионистам (то есть потенциальным эмигрантам — «предателям советской Родины», а позже и к «расистам», согласно резолюции 3379 1975 года ООН, позже отмененной резолюцией 46/86 1991 года). Их легко могли выгнать с работы или из вуза, а некоторые учителя иврита даже были осуждены на тюремное заключение под различными предлогами — так произошло, например, с Эфраимом Холмянским, Юлием Эдельштейном и многими другими.

В 1987 году подпольные преподаватели иврита в СССР образовали «Игуд а-морим» — профсоюз преподавателей иврита. Его председателями были Зеэв Гейзель, Лев Городецкий и Авигдор Левит.

После Перестройки постепенно начали употреблять и в официальных кругах постсоветского пространства обозначение «иврит» вместо «древнееврейский» для обозначения всех стадий развития иврита как более общий термин, оставив употребление понятия «древнееврейский» для специальных лингвистических работ.

Название

Само слово עִבְרִית иврит переводится с языка иврит как прилагательное «еврейская». Женский род здесь употребляется потому, что существительное שׂפה сафа́ («язык», «речь»), к которому по умолчанию относится это прилагательное, на иврите женского рода.

Письмо и чтение

• Иврит использует для письма еврейский алфавит в так называемом квадратном шрифте, как и языки арамейский и идиш.
• Квадратный шрифт — это вид алфавита (на иврите — алеф-бет). Это означает, что каждый знак (буква) соответствует определённому звуку, в отличие от неалфавитных систем (отчасти древнеегипетский, китайский), в которых каждый знак обозначает понятие (идеограмма) или сочетание звуков (слоговое письмо).
• В алфавите иврита 22 буквы (или 23, если считать букву син^{[источник не указан 59 дней]}), все буквы соответствуют согласным звукам (консонантное письмо). В иврите нет ни одной буквы, изначально соответствовавшей какому-либо гласному, однако четыре буквы (алеф, хей, йуд и вав) перестали использоваться для обозначения исключительно согласных звуков и используются также как матрес лекционис («матери чтения») для обозначения гласных. Написание букв одна после другой — справа налево, буквы не соединяются между собой (хотя в рукописях это не всегда так), а строки следуют одна за другой сверху вниз.
• Гласные звуки передаются с помощью специальных значков огласовок (ивр. נקודות‎ — некудо́т), состоящих из комбинаций точек и штрихов, ставящихся вокруг буквы (сверху, снизу, слева). Гласный звук, соответствующий значку огласовки, произносится после буквы. Если после согласного звука нет гласного, под буквой ставится нечитаемый значок шва (ְ). Иногда огласовочные точки и штрихи комбинируются с четырьмя «матерями чтения»; в этом конкретном случае, эти буквы уже не читаются как согласные, а используются для передачи гласных звуков. (Об этом см. ниже).
• В подавляющем большинстве текстов значки огласовок не пишутся. Огласовки ставятся лишь в

• религиозных текстах,
• песнях и стихах,
• учебниках для школ и ульпанов,
• книжках для детей,
• иногда — в иностранных словах и словах, которые могут читаться по-разному

и некоторых других текстах.

В европейской литературе часто проводится сравнение неогласованного текста на иврите с текстом на европейском (например, на русском) языке с пропущенными гласными. Например, сравнивается слово ספר с написанием КНГ, и отмечается, что последнее на русском языке можно прочитать и как «КНиГа» и как «КоНяГа». На самом деле подобное сравнение неправомерно. Особенности грамматики иврита таковы, что гласные частью корня не являются, и потому пропуск гласных в слове соответствует в русском языке не пропуску всех гласных, а пропуску гласных в некоторых (не всех) суффиксах и в некоторых (не всех) окончаниях. Например, при написании русских слов по аналогии с ивритскими, мы получили бы такой ряд однокоренных слов: «программ», «программст», «программрвть», «программнй» и т. п.

• Для облегчения чтения текста без огласовок, применяется «полное письмо» (ивр. כתיב מלא‎), когда часть звуков у, о обозначается дополнительным написанием буквы вав, часть звуков и, э обозначается дополнительным написанием буквы йуд, а в словах иностранного происхождения небольшая часть звуков а, э обозначается дополнительным написанием буквы алеф.

Огласовки

Значки огласовок служат для обозначения гласных звуков. Произношение звуков а, э, и, о, у примерно соответствует русскому произношению. Согласные в иврите никогда не палатализуются (не смягчаются) перед гласными «и» или «е (э)».

Кроме этого, некоторые безударные звуки (э, а, о) могут передаваться с помощью значка шва ְ (две точки под буквой, расположенные вертикально), или комбинацией шва со значками сэголь, камац и патах (все ставятся под буквой и последние называются с добавлением впереди слова хатаф).

Хатаф-огласовки:

То, что одному звуку соответствуют несколько значков, объясняется тем, что в древности они обозначали разные звуки, например, по долготе. Так, патах — был кратким звуком а, а камац — долгим. Аналогично и остальные гласные звуки (э, и, о, у). В современном иврите различие в долготе исчезло, но разница на письме осталась.

Буквы

Основная статья: Еврейский алфавит

В еврейском алфавите 22 буквы.

Примечания

• В Израиле используются в основном стандартные названия букв с элементами ашкеназских названий.
• Русская транслитерация, данная в таблице, приблизительна.

Конечные буквы

Пять букв имеют два разных начертания — одно в начале и середине слова, другое — в конце:

Одна из версий появления конечных букв — поскольку в древности слова писались слитно, то конечные буквы были необходимы для разделения слов. Возможно, особая форма написания была у всех букв, но до нас дошли лишь эти пять. В родственном арабском языке сохраняется различное написание начальных, срединных и конечных букв.

Другая версия — конечная форма является исторически более древней, а неконечная возникла при скорописи: хвостик, шедший вниз, стал загибаться в сторону следующей буквы, и только в конце слова при остановке пишущей руки оставался хвостик, направленный вниз.

Одинаковые по звучанию буквы

Несколько букв алфавита также могут обозначать иногда один звук:

• куф ק и каф с дагешем כּ читаются к
• вав ו и бет без дагеша ב читаются в
• хет ח и каф без дагеша כ читаются х
• тет ט и тав ת читаются т
• самех ס и син שׂ читаются с
• аин ע и алеф א — обе не читаются

Однако буквы: א, ק, ט, ס (а не их «пары» с одинаковыми звуками) обязательно пишутся в словах иностранного (но не арабского) происхождения и нееврейских именах, например: слово «текст» на иврите будет выглядеть как «טקסט», а не «תכשת», или нееврейское имя «Костя»: «קוסטיה». Исключение: в случае, когда слово заимствовано из английского языка, вместо диграфа th пишется буква тав; чтобы подчеркнуть разницу в произношении, иногда слева от буквы тав ставят апостроф: ‘ת. Пример: имя актрисы Риз Уизерспун на иврите пишется как ריס וית’רספון (обратите внимание на ‘ת), потому что на английском оно пишется как Reese Witherspoon. Аналогично, буква тав часто используется в словах греческого происхождения на месте буквы θ (например, в словах эстетика (ивр. אסתטיקה‎), атлетика (ивр. אתלטיקה‎), математика (ивр. מתמטיקה‎) это касается первого из двух Т).

Для правильного письма необходимо запоминать слова вместе с их написанием, так как разные по смыслу и написанию слова могут иметь одинаковое произношение.

Например:

• слово О́шер, начинающееся с буквы алеф — אושר, означает «счастье»,
• слово О́шер, начинающееся с буквы аин — עושר, означает «богатство».

Причина обозначения двумя буквами одного звука — та же, что и у значков огласовок: в древности каждая буква служила для обозначения своего звука (в том числе и буквы алеф и аин), в современном же иврите различие в произношении было для простоты упразднено, а правописание сохраняется (исключение — в речи выходцев из арабских стран различия сохраняются).

• Разницы между прописными (заглавными) и строчными буквами в иврите нет.

• Буквой шин (син) записываются две различные фонемы, произносящиеся сегодня /ш/ и /с/ соответственно. В огласованном письме они различаются точками: у шин различительная точка ставится сверху возле правого «зубчика», а у син— возле левого. В неогласованных текстах эта различительная точка не ставится, и слово приходится заучивать вместе с произношением.

• Некоторые буквы меняют своё произношение (а в некоторых учебниках и название) в зависимости от положения в слове. В начале слова эти 3 буквы (каф/хаф, бет/вет и пей/фей) произносятся как к, б и п, в конце слова — х, в и ф. В середине слова возможны оба варианта произношения. В заимствованных словах это правило не действует на букву пей, которая может произноситься на конце слова как п, что на письме обозначается обычным её начально-серединным начертанием פ, например имя Филипп записывается פיליפ, в начале же слова она может произноситься как ф, например в слове פיזיקה — физика; а также на букву каф в арабизмах, например מובארכ (Мубарак).

В огласованном письме взрывное произношение букв каф, бет и пей можно отличить от их фрикативного произношения по различительной точке внутри этих букв (согласная с этой точкой становится взрывной), называемой даге́ш. В неогласованных текстах эта точка отсутствует, и для верного чтения слов необходимо знать либо сами слова, либо грамматические законы, по которым определяется произношение буквы. Знать слова в этом случае необходимо и для правильного письма, так как

• звук в может передаваться буквами вав и бет,
• звук к — буквами каф и куф,
• звук х — буквами каф и хет.

Отметим, что, в отличие от букв шин и син, здесь речь идет не о буквах, обозначающих разные фонемы, а о вариантах произношения одной и той же буквы, соответствующих древним аллофонам одной и той же фонемы. В неогласованных текстах можно иногда проверить произношение незнакомого слова, подобрав соответствующее знакомое по произношению однокоренное слово, где данная буква стоит в начале или в конце этого слова.

Например:

миХТаВ (звук Х — это Хаф или Хет?).

Решение проблемы:

Большинство слов имеют в иврите трёхбуквенный корень. В данном слове это — КТВ. Так как слово переводится как «письмо», по смыслу вспоминаем однокоренное слово: КоТеВ (= «пишу»), там слышится звук к, то есть на первом месте у корня стоит буква каф. Следовательно, и в слове миХТаВ на первом месте в корне стоит буква каф, а не хет. Отметим здесь, что и в русском языке можно иногда проверить правописание с помощью нахождения однокоренных слов.

Ашкеназское произношение

Основные отличия ашкеназского произношения иврита от принятого в Израиле (упрощенный вариант сефардского произношения) сводятся к следующему.

• Ударение в ашкеназском иврите при разговоре обычно падает на предпоследний слог, а при чтении религиозных текстов, в соответствии с древнееврейскими правилами грамматики-как правило на последнем, а в сефардском сохранилось место древнего ударения (в большинстве случаев — на последний слог, а в некоторых грамматических формах и в некоторых категориях слов — на предпоследний. В последнем случае, разумеется, ударение в ашкеназском и сефардском вариантах одинаково).
• В ашкеназском произношении сохранилось различие в произношении звука, передаваемого буквой ת без знака дагеш («Тав рэфуя»). В произношении йеменских евреев эта буква читается, как щелевой звук, похожий на английское th в слове think. В сефардском (и современном израильском) произношении различие между «Тав дгуша» (то есть со знаком Дагеш) и «Тав Рэфуя» было утрачено, и буква ת всегда читается как Т. В ашкеназском же варианте щелевое произношение сохранилось, хотя и в измененном виде — вместо межзубного звука Θ стал произноситься звук С.
• В древнем иврите было различение гласных по долготе, т.е гласные были долгие и краткие, по мнению Виленского Гаона долгие гласные являются дифтонгами. В современном иврите нет различий по долготе гласных, при этом изменения звучания были различными в сефардском и в ашкеназском вариантах. В сефардском варианте произношение долгих гласных совпало с произношением кратких (кроме огласовки Камац, которая имеет два варианта — долгий, «камац гадоль», и краткий, «камац катан», который произносился, как «о»; в современном иврите, в силу сложности правил различия этих огласовок, «камац катан» часто заменяют на огласовку Холам). Таким образом, в современном иврите «краткий а» и «долгий а» произносятся одинаково — как «а». В ашкеназском же варианте долгие гласные А, О и Э изменили своё звучание: долгий А стал произноситься как О (а потом в южных диалектах, например, на территории Украины, перешёл в У); долгий О перешёл в дифтонг ОЙ (а потом в диалектах на территории Литвы и Белоруссии — в дифтонг ЭЙ); долгий Э перешёл в дифтонг ЭЙ. Долгие звуки У и И в ашкеназском произношении совпали с соответствующими краткими, то есть эти два звука произносятся в ашкеназском варианте и в сефардском варианте одинаково.
• Кроме того, в результате упомянутого выше сдвига ударения гласная О, образовавшаяся на месте исконного долгого А, подверглась редукции и в словах, заимствованных из иврита в идиш, стала произносится как Э (хотя в собственно ивритских текстах, например, при чтении молитв, продолжали произносить О).

Примеры.

Слово שבת («суббота») в ашкеназском произношении звучит как «ша́бос» (идиш «ша́бес»), а в сефардском — как «шаба́т».

Слово משפחה («семья») в ашкеназском произношении звучит как «мишпо́хо» (идиш «мишпо́хэ», «мишпу́хэ»), а в сефардском — как «мишпаха́».

Слово בית-דין («суд») в ашкеназском произношении звучит как «бейс-дин», а в сефардском — как «бет-дин».

Имя משה в ашкеназском произношении звучит как «Мо́йше», а в сефардском — как «Моше́».

См. также

• Древнееврейский язык
• Еврейский алфавит
• Еврейские языки
• Литература на иврите

Примечания

Словари

• Онлайновый словарь иврита, Большой иврит-русский и русско-ивритский словарь под ред. д-ра Б. Подольского

Ссылки

• Иврит язык — статья из Электронной еврейской энциклопедии
• Возрождение иврита, Элиэзер Бен-Йехуда.
• Самоучитель иврита
• Иврит через мозг
• Виртуальный Ульпан: иврит древний и современный, грамматика и лексика
• Иврит современный  (англ.)
• Несколько вопросов и ответов об иврите, «Глобус Израиля»

Еврейские языки
Афразийские языки
Иврит	древнееврейский язык † • средневековый иврит † • современный иврит
Еврейско-арамейские языки	староиудейский † • самаритянско-арамейский † • галилейско-арамейский † • восточноиорданский вавилонский иудейско-арамейский † • палестинский иудейско-арамейский † • заху • барзани • урмийский • эрбильский • хулау́ла
Еврейско-арабские диалекты	еврейско-марокканский • еврейско-триполитанский • еврейско-тунисский • еврейско-иракский • еврейско-йеменский
Другие	еврейско-берберские
Индоевропейские языки
Германские языки	еврейско-английские (ешивиш • йинглиш) • идиш (белорусско-литовский диалект • украинский диалект • польский диалект)
Еврейско-романские языки	еврейско-латинский † • еврейско-итальянские • еврейско-португальский † • еврейско-каталанский † • еврейско-арагонский † • сефардский • еврейско-окситанский † • еврейско-французский †
Еврейско-иранские языки	еврейско-таджикский • горско-еврейский • еврейско-персидский • еврейско-курдский
Другие	еврейско-греческий • еврейско-славянские †
Тюркские языки
караимский (галичский, крымский, тракайский) • крымчакский • хазарский †
Дравидийские языки
еврейский малаялам
Картвельские языки
еврейско-грузинский
Примечание: † – мёртвые языки