Modern Hebrew

The most common scholarly term for the language is "Modern Hebrew" (עברית חדשה ʿivrít ħadašá[h]). Most people refer to it simply as Hebrew (עברית Ivrit).[13]

The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic"[14] as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew.[14] Haiim B. Rosén (חיים רוזן) supported the now widely used[14] term "Israeli Hebrew" on the basis that it "represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew".[13][15] In 1999, Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed the term "Israeli" to represent the multiple origins of the language.[16]^: 325[13]

The history of the Hebrew language can be divided into four major periods:[17]

• Biblical Hebrew, until about the 3rd century BCE; the language of most of the Hebrew Bible
• Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah and Talmud
• Medieval Hebrew, from about the 6th to the 13th century CE
• Modern Hebrew, the language of the modern State of Israel

Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during about 1200 to 586 BCE.[18] Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region.

Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile, Hebrew became restricted to liturgical use.[19]

Hebrew had been spoken at various times and for a number of purposes throughout the Diaspora, and during the Old Yishuv it had developed into a spoken lingua franca among the Jews of Palestine.[20] Eliezer Ben-Yehuda then led a revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling and grammar, and Sephardic pronunciation. Many idioms and calques were made from Yiddish. Its acceptance by the early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was caused primarily by support from the organisations of Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and the official status it received in the 1922 constitution of the British Mandate for Palestine.[21][22][23][24] Ben-Yehuda codified and planned Modern Hebrew using 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries. Many new words were borrowed from Arabic, due to the language's common Semitic roots with Hebrew, but changed to fit Hebrew phonology and grammar, for example the words gerev (sing.) and garbayim (pl.) are now applied to 'socks', a diminutive of the Arabic ğuwārib ('socks').[25][26] In addition, early Jewish immigrants, borrowing from the local Arabs, and later immigrants from Arab lands introduced many nouns as loanwords from Arabic (such as nana, zaatar, mishmish, kusbara, ḥilba, lubiya, hummus, gezer, rayḥan, etc.), as well as much of Modern Hebrew's slang. Despite Ben-Yehuda's fame as the renewer of Hebrew, the most productive renewer of Hebrew words was poet Haim Nahman Bialik.

One of the phenomena seen with the revival of the Hebrew language is that old meanings of nouns were occasionally changed for altogether different meanings, such as bardelas (ברדלס), which in Mishnaic Hebrew meant 'hyena',[27] but in Modern Hebrew it now means 'cheetah'; or shezīph (שְׁזִיף) which is now used for 'plum', but formerly meant 'jujube'.[28] The word kishū’īm (formerly 'cucumbers')[29] is now applied to a variety of summer squash (Cucurbita pepo var. cylindrica), a plant native to the New World. Another example is the word kǝvīš (כביש), which now denotes a street or a road, but is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning 'trodden down' or 'blazed', rather than a common noun. It was originally used to describe a blazed trail.[30][31] The flower Anemone coronaria, called in Modern Hebrew kalanit, was formerly called in Hebrew shoshanat ha-melekh ('the king's flower').[32][33]

For a simple comparison between the Sephardic and Yemenite versions of Mishnaic Hebrew, see Yemenite Hebrew.

Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family, the Canaanite branch of the Northwest Semitic subgroup.[34][35][36][37] While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah eras and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax,[38][39] the consensus among scholars is that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state.[40]

Modern Hebrew is considered to be a koiné language based on historical layers of Hebrew that incorporates foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution.[40][34] A minority of scholars argue that the revived language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European.[41][42][43][44] Those theories have not been met with general acceptance, and the consensus among a majority of scholars is that Modern Hebrew, despite its non-Semitic influences, can correctly be classified as a Semitic language.[35][45] Although European languages have had an impact on Modern Hebrew, the impact may often be overstated. Although Modern Hebrew has more of the features attributed to Standard Average European than Biblical Hebrew, it is still quite distant, and has fewer such features than Modern Standard Arabic.[46]

Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet, which is an abjad, or consonant-only script of 22 letters based on the "square" letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which was developed from the Aramaic script. A cursive script is used in handwriting. When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letters known as Nikkud, or by use of Matres lectionis, which are consonantal letters used as vowels. Further diacritics like Dagesh and Sin and Shin dots are used to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the consonants (e.g. bet/vet, shin/sin). The letters "צ׳‎", "ג׳‎", "ז׳‎", each modified with a Geresh, represent the consonants [t͡ʃ], [d͡ʒ], [ʒ]. The consonant [t͡ʃ] may also be written as "תש" and "טש". [w] is represented interchangeably by a simple vav "ו", non-standard double vav "וו" and sometimes by non-standard geresh modified vav "ו׳".

Name	Alef	Bet	Gimel	Dalet	He	Vav	Zayin	Chet	Tet	Yod	Kaf	Lamed	Mem	Nun	Samech	Ayin	Pe	Tzadi	Kof	Resh	Shin	Tav
Printed letter	א	ב	ג	ד	ה	ו	ז	ח	ט	י	כ	ל	מ	נ	ס	ע	פ	צ	ק	ר	ש	ת
Cursive letter
Pronunciation	[ʔ], ∅	[b], [v]	[g]	[d]	[h]	[v]	[z]	[x]~[χ]	[t]	[j]	[k], [x]~[χ]	[l]	[m]	[n]	[s]	[ʔ], ∅	[p], [f]	[t͡s]	[k]	[ɣ]~[ʁ]	[ʃ], [s]	[t]
Transliteration	a,e,i,o,u,'	b, v	g	d	h	v	z	h, ch	t	y	k, kh	l	m	n	s	a,e,i,o,u,'	p, f	ts	k	r	sh, s	t

Modern Hebrew has fewer phonemes than Biblical Hebrew but it has developed its own phonological complexity. Israeli Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants, depending on whether the speaker has pharyngeals. It has 5 to 10 vowels, depending on whether diphthongs and long and short vowels are counted, varying with the speaker and the analysis.

This table lists the consonant phonemes of Israeli Hebrew in IPA transcription:[2]

¹ In modern Hebrew /ħ/ for ח has been absorbed by /x~χ/ that was traditionally only for fricative כ, but some (mainly older) Mizrahi speakers still separate them.[47]

² The glottal consonants are elided in most unstressed syllables and sometimes also in stressed syllables, but they are pronounced in careful or formal speech. In modern Hebrew, /ʕ/ for ע has merged with /ʔ/ (א), but some speakers (particularly older Mizrahi speakers) still separate them.[47]

³ Commonly transcribed /r/. This is usually pronounced as a uvular fricative or approximant [ʁ] or velar fricative [ɣ], and sometimes as a uvular [ʀ] or alveolar trill [r] or alveolar flap [ɾ], depending on the background of the speaker.[47]

⁴ The phonemes /w, dʒ, ʒ/ were introduced through borrowings.

⁵ The phoneme /tʃ/ צ׳ was introduced through borrowings,[48] but it can appear in native words as a sequence of /t/ ת and /ʃ/ שׁ as in תְּשׁוּקָה /tʃuˈka/.

Obstruents often assimilate in voicing: voiceless obstruents (/p t ts tʃ k, f s ʃ x/) become voiced ([b d dz dʒ ɡ, v z ʒ ɣ]) when they appear immediately before voiced obstruents, and vice versa.

Hebrew has five basic vowel phonemes:

Long vowels occur unpredictably if two identical vowels were historically separated by a pharyngeal or glottal consonant, and the first was stressed.

Any of the five short vowels may be realized as a schwa [ə] when it is far from lexical stress.

There are two diphthongs, /aj/ and /ej/.[2]

Most lexical words have lexical stress on one of the last two syllables, the last syllable being more frequent in formal speech. Loanwords may have stress on the antepenultimate syllable or even earlier.

Modern Hebrew morphology (formation, structure, and interrelationship of words in a language) is essentially Biblical.[49] Modern Hebrew showcases much of the inflectional morphology of the classical upon which it was based. In the formation of new words, all verbs and the majority of nouns and adjectives are formed by the classically Semitic devices of triconsonantal roots (shoresh) with affixed patterns (mishkal). Mishnaic attributive patterns are often used to create nouns, and Classical patterns are often used to create adjectives. Blended words are created by merging two bound stems or parts of words.

The syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic[49] but also shows the influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed during the revival period and over the past century.

Modern Hebrew has expanded its vocabulary effectively to meet the needs of casual vernacular, of science and technology, of journalism and belles-lettres. 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.[51]^: 64–65

• Biblical Hebrew

• Choueka, Yaakov (1997). Rav-Milim: A comprehensive dictionary of Modern Hebrew. Tel Aviv: CET. ISBN 978-965-448-323-0.
• Ben-Ḥayyim, Ze'ev (1992). The Struggle for a Language. Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language.
• Dekel, Nurit (2014). Colloquial Israeli Hebrew: A Corpus-based Survey. De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-037725-5.
• Gila Freedman Cohen; Carmia Shoval (2011). Easing Into Modern Hebrew Grammar: A User-friendly Reference and Exercise Book. Magnes Press. ISBN 978-965-493-601-9.
• Shlomo Izreʾel; Shlomo Raz (1996). Studies in Modern Semitic Languages. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-10646-8.
• Matras, Yaron; Schiff, Leora (2005). "Spoken Israeli Hebrew revisited: Structures and variation" (PDF). Studia Semitica. 16: 145–193.
• Ornan, Uzzi (2003). "The Final Word: Mechanism for Hebrew Word Generation". Hebrew Studies. Haifa University. 45: 285–287. JSTOR 27913706.
• Bergsträsser, Gotthelf (1983). Peter T. Daniels (ed.). Introduction to the Semitic Languages: Text Specimens and Grammatical Sketches. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-0-931464-10-2.
• Haiim B. Rosén [in Hebrew] (1962). A Textbook of Israeli Hebrew. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-72603-8.
• Stefan Weninger (23 December 2011). The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.
• Wexler, Paul (1990). The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 978-3-447-03063-2.
• Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1403917232.

Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Hebrew.

• Modern Hebrew Swadesh list
• The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew - introduction by Tel Aviv University
• Hebrew Today – Should You Learn Modern Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew?
• History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language by David Steinberg
• Short History of the Hebrew Language by Chaim Menachem Rabin
• Academy of the Hebrew Language: How a Word is Born