The Evolution of Modern Hebrew Language

Why doesn't Israeli Hebrew sound Semitic

at all?

Do you think because it wasn't created by someone who was

Semitic? Mm, yes, I said created. Let's get

into it. So modern Hebrew or Israeli Hebrew has only been

around for around 150 years or so. Before

that, ancient Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew was a

non-spoken language for around 2,000

years. It was mostly used liturgically, so for prayer and for sacred

texts, and sometimes in poetry or literature, but it was not

spoken at all. In fact, the Talmud was not even written in

Hebrew. It was written in Aramaic.

So when was Hebrew revived to what we hear today?

So the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language is largely

attributed to a Russian dude named Eliezer Yitzhak

Perelman. He was an Ashkenazi Jewish linguist,

who later changed

his name to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, of course, and he was obsessed with

this idea of reviving Hebrew as a spoken language.

Now, his native language was Yiddish, as was the language of most Central

and Eastern European Jewish folks at the time.

And so what he did is he took the Sephardic Jewish

pronunciation, and of

course, he overlaid that with the European pronunciations,

heavily

influenced by Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German.

And so because of that, for instance, Israeli Hebrew doesn't roll

their Rs like Semitic languages do.

So they don't say ra, they say ra. For instance, like Israel,

right? And so that's why they sound more German,

for instance, when they say

hummus instead of hummus. Another

example is they don't have the Semitic sound a.

Instead, they have to say a because they don't know

how to say a.

So instead of saying Aliyah, they say Aliyah.

And so that's why the accent sounds so flat as opposed to

Arabic-based dialects or ancient Hebrew.

And by the way, this whole idea of Hebrew becoming a

spoken language

was actually frowned upon by the Orthodox and devout Jewish

community because to them, Hebrew was meant to be for prayer and

sacred ceremonies. It wasn't meant to be used in everyday

mundane

contexts. But in the end, of course, because of the Zionist movement,

this whole idea of having a specific language for this Jewish-only

state was very, very enticing. And so in

1922, Britain declared modern Israeli

Hebrew one of the three languages of the land, including Arabic and

including English. And to end this, there's no real way of knowing what

ancient

Hebrew really sounded like, but there are some beautiful indications of

what it might have sounded like when we hear Yemenite Hebrew.