Hebrew

• Periodization
  • Early (pre-Biblical) Hebrew
  • Judean (Biblical and Mishnaic) Hebrew
  • Scholarly (Rabbinic and Medieval) Hebrew
  • Israeli (Modern Literary and Spoken) Hebrew; Revival
• The influence of Hebrew on Jewish Languages

Hebrew is. without question, the Jewish language -- the source of all the 'Jewish' vocabulary of the other Jewish languages. Close behind it in significance is Aramaic.

Examples of this are the borrowing of the alephbeit from Aramaic, books of Ezra and Daniel; Talmud; Kaddish -- other parts of the prayer books; _ Ha-lachma anya, _ Chad gadya; Zohar.

All of us have heard of Yiddish, some have heard of Ladino. Are there other Jewish languages?

Are there other "religious languages"? Islamic languages: Arabic (plays the role Hebrew does in Jewish languages), Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Swahili. Christian languages: (no comparable central language) Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ge'ez, Church Slavonic.

What do we mean by Jewish languages?
Yiddish and Judezmo are independent traditional languages of the Ashkenazic and the eastern Sephardic subculture groups of the Jewish people with Judaism as their focal point. They are products of the group-forming factor of religion

They contain an element of Hebrew and Aramaic
They are (were, in the case of Judezmo) written in the Hebrew alephbeit
Talmudic orthography is the origin of their respective spelling systems

Jewish languages are NOT

a) dialects -- A Jewish languages structure whose center is Judaism cannot be dialect of a language which has as its focal point Christian or Islamic culture
b) jargons -- A jargon is the restricted vocabulary used by those engaged in a particular trade or occupation, but does not form the general vehicle of communication among members of a whole community.
c) mixed languages -- Jewish languages are no more mixed then many other languages ranging from English and German to Persian and Turkish, which are not so designated.
d)corrupted languages -- They are not corruptions because they obviously fulfill their function -- when a linguistic structure does so, it is not corrupted.
e) Creolized languages -- There is less justification for calling them Creolized languages than for classifying Spanish or French as 'Creolized Latin.'
f) Finally, calling them Judeo- would be admissible if linguists spoke of Gallo-Latin for French, or Normano-Anglo-Saxon for English, or Arabo-Perso-Turkish for Turkish.

Stages of Hebrew: modern Hebrew was not created by Eliezer ben Yehudah, he tried to systematize it and determine 'proper' sources for word borrowing and creation: first -- Biblical Hebrew, then Mishnah, then medieval poetry and translations, then Aramaic, then Arabic, only then European languages. Hebrew is now a living language with over 5 million speakers world wide. Here is an example of a a poem by Abraham Abulafia who lived in the 13th century Spain.

_

Aramaic I

Aramaic II

Aramaic III

Aramaic

• The rise and spread of a lingua franca - Jewish and non-Jewish Aramaic, Syriac
• Eastern and Western Aramaic
• Aramaic in the Tanakh, Targum, Talmud, Siddur, later use
• Modern Aramaic (Swedaya, Jabali) -- Present status

Aramaic: pagan, Christian (Syriac) and Jewish -- Syriac developed it own form of scripts -- probably source of Arabic script. Few speakers left of Western Aramaic (Ma'lula -- near Damascus), possibly half a million speakers of Eastern Aramaic -- mostly in Kurdistan (Kurdish Jews in Israel still speak their Aramaic).

Reproduction of cover of S. Toulmin's Cosmopolis.

(To Modernity)

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