Hebrew was spoken after the so-called conquest of Israel (c. thirteenth century BC).
Following a gradual decline (even Jesus, ‘King of the Jews’
was a native speaker of Aramaic rather than
Hebrew), it ceased to be spoken during the second century AD. The
Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans,
which took place in Judaea in AD 132-5, marks the symbolic end of
the period of spoken Hebrew. According
to the Roman historian Dio Cassius (who might have exaggerated), the Romans killed 580 000 Jews,
in addition to those who died of hunger, disease and fire, and Bar-Kokhba himself met his death in AD 135
during the fall of Bethar. In the period of repression which followed, the Jewish population in Judaea was largely
exterminated through massacres,
religious persecution, slavery and forced relocation. For more than
1700 years thereafter, Hebrew was
comatose – either a ‘sleeping beauty’ or ‘walking
dead’. It served as a liturgical and literary language and
occasionally also as a lingua franca for Jews of the Diaspora, but
not as a mother tongue. The formation of
Israeli (the name I use for so-called ‘Modern Hebrew’)
was facilitated at the end of the nineteenth century
by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, school teachers and others to further the
Zionist cause. Earlier, during the Haskalah
(enlightenment) period of the 1770s-1880s, writers such as Méndele
Mokhér Sfarím (Shalom Abramowitsch)
produced works and neologisms which eventually contributed to Israeli.
However, it was not until the
beginning of the twentieth century that the language was first spoken.
During the past half-century, Israeli has become the official language
of Israel, acting as the primary mode
of communication throughout all state and local institutions and
in all domains of public and private life. Yet,
with the growing diversification of Israeli society, it has come
also to highlight the very absence of a unitary
civic culture among citizens who seem increasingly to share only
their language. The exalted status currently
enjoyed by Israeli is, in fact, the result of an ideological process
linking its historical development with the
politics of national revival.
As a result of distinctive characteristics, such as the lack of
a continuous chain of native speakers from Hebrew
to Israeli, Israeli presents the linguist with a unique laboratory
in which to test a wider set of theoretical
problems concerning language genesis and evolution. Indeed, the
genetic classification of Israeli has
preoccupied linguists from the beginning of the twentieth century.
The still prevalent, traditional view
suggests that Israeli is Semitic: (Biblical/Mishnaic) Hebrew revived
(cf. Rosén 1956 and Rabin 1974).
Educators, scholars and politicians have contributed to this assumption,
in their efforts to impose a
nationalist narrative on linguistic reality. Revisionists counter
that it is actually Indo-European: Yiddish
‘relexified’, that is Yiddish with Hebrew vocabulary
(cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997). My own hypothesis is
that Israeli is a hybrid language, both Semitic and Indo-European.
I argue that both Hebrew and Yiddish
act equally as its primary contributors, accompanied by a plethora of other contributors such as Polish, Russian, German, Judaeo-Spanish (a.k.a. 'Ladino'), Arabic, English etc. Thus, the term Israeli is far more appropriate than 'Israeli Hebrew', let alone 'Modern Hebrew' or 'Hebrew' tout court.
(i) <<< Two Primary Contributors: HEBREW <-> YIDDISH
(ii) <<< Many Additional Contributors: Russian, Polish,
English, German, Judaeo-Spanish ('Ladino'), Arabic etc.
This book seeks to expose as myths some of the linguistic assumptions
that traditionalists
(and in some cases revisionists) take for granted:
(1) The Stammbaum Model Myth,
(2) The Internal Development Myth,
(3) The Literary as Spoken Language Myth,
(4) The Mutual Intelligibility Myth, and
(5) The Thin Language Myth.
The Stammbaum Model (family tree) insists that every language has
only one parent. To refute this, some revisionists have drawn heavily
on linguistic debate about creole languages. Undoubtedly, creolistics
has an important bearing on the problem of Israeli. Yet, I would
challenge their particular application. The terms substratum and
superstratum, invoked by revisionists to support their argument
that Israeli is fundamentally Yiddish, are often used in creolistics
and in studies of language evolution to describe the relative influence
of one language on another. Traditionally, the substratum is the
base language, which determines the structural foundations of the
emerging creole. The superstratum is the prestigious language influencing
the emerging creole from above, especially with regard to vocabulary.
Israeli revisionists contend that Yiddish, the revivalists’
mother tongue, is the substratum whilst Hebrew is only a superstratum.
However, ‘substratum’ and especially ‘superstratum’
are politically charged, and often misleading.
The reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple
family tree system allows. It might well be the case that ‘each
language has a single parent’ ‘in the normal course
of linguistic evolution’ (as emphasized by Dixon 1997: 11-13,
italics mine). However, an engineered language (cf. ‘non-genetic
language’ in Thomason and Kaufman 1988) or a semi-engineered
language like Israeli (semi because the Yiddish contribution was
not ‘planned’), can be, for example, 40% Hebrew, 40%
Yiddish, 10% Polish, 10% Russian, 10% English, 5% German, 5% Arabic
and 5% Judaeo-Spanish. Thus, the comparative method of reconstruction
(cf. Hock 1986, Anttila 1989, McMahon 1994), as well as comparative
lexico-statistics (cf. Swadesh 1952) – though useful in many
cases – cannot alone explain the ‘genetics’ (the
study of how languages came to be) of all languages.
A principle which weakens the Stammbaum Model, casts light on the
complex genesis of Israeli, and explains why the sum of the figures
above can amount to more than 100% is the Congruence Principle:
‘if a feature exists in more than one contributor –
whether primary or additional– it is more likely to persist
in the target language’ (see Zuckermann 2003). Thus, the Subject-Verb-Object
syntax of Israeli might be based simultaneously on that of standard
European and on the marked order (for emphasis/contrast) of Mishnaic
Hebrew (rather than Biblical Hebrew). Interestingly, the combination
of Semitic and Indo-European influences is a phenomenon which can
be seen occurring already in the primary contributors to Israeli
themselves. Whilst (slavonicized Germanic) Yiddish was shaped by
Hebrew and Aramaic, Indo-European languages, such as Greek, played
a role in (Semitic) Hebrew. In fact, before the emergence of Israeli,
Yiddish itself influenced some Medieval and Modern Hebrew variants
(see Glinert 1991) which then in turn influenced Israeli together
with Yiddish.
The second myth, which underpins the conservative view of Israeli
as pure Hebrew, is the Internal Development Myth. It argues –
inter alia because of an unfortunate lack of distinction between
Hebrew linguistics and Israeli linguistics – that every linguistic
feature in Israeli is a result of an internal development within
Hebrew. The extent to which western languages affect Israeli is
controversial, not least because purists would prefer ‘Modern
Hebrew’ to remain ‘uncontaminated’.
Goldenberg (1996: 151-8) claims that the changes in the phonetic/phonological
system of Israeli are no different from changes observed in Hebrew.
However, I believe that the phonetic system of Israeli is not, as
his analysis seems to suggest, a result of internal convergence
and divergence within Hebrew. Rather, it is mostly a result of employing
the phonology of Yiddish (and Yiddish-like Ashkenazic Hebrew).
A creolistic tool known as the Founder Principle (cf. Harrison
et al. 1988 and Mufwene 2001) may profitably be adapted to the case
of Israeli. It is often used to explain why the structural features
of creoles are largely predetermined by the characteristics of the
languages spoken by the founder population, i.e. by the first colonists.
In the context of Israeli, it could be argued that Yiddish is a
primary contributor to Israeli because it was the mother tongue
of the vast majority of the revivalists (e.g. Ben-Yehuda) and first
pioneers in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth. All the other languages which have influenced
Israeli – except for Hebrew – are additional contributors.
Unlike the anti-revivalist revisionists, I would argue that Hebrew
too fulfills the criteria of a primary contributor because, despite
its 1700 years without native speakers, it persisted as an important
literary and liturgical language throughout the generations. Thus,
for example, whilst Israeli phonetics, phonology and syntax are
primarily European, its morphology and basic vocabulary are mainly
– albeit not exclusively – Semitic.
Some Israeli grammarians – just like many laymen –
do not differentiate categorically between a literary language and
a spoken mother tongue. Joshua Blau (1981) compares Israeli to ‘Modern
Standard Arabic’, claiming that western European influence
on Israeli is similar to western European influence on Modern Standard
Arabic. He admits that Israeli is more distant from ‘Classical
Hebrew’ than Modern Standard Arabic from Classical Arabic,
but insists that the difference is quantitative rather than qualitative
(1976: 112). However, whilst Israeli is a spoken mother tongue,
Modern Standard Arabic – as opposed to the various vernacular
Arabics – is not (although, intriguingly, the University of
Iowa is looking for a professor with ‘native or near-native
fluency in Modern Standard Arabic’, see Linguist List, 1 July
2004).
On the other hand, many linguists classify Israeli in the category
of modernized Semitic vernaculars, just like Palestinian Arabic.
But comparing Israeli to Semitic languages characterized by both
Indo-European traits (like Israeli) and a continuous chain of native
speakers (unlike Israeli) is problematic. This book demonstrates
that the formation of Israeli was not a result of language contact
between Hebrew and a prestigious, powerful superstratum such as
English in the case of Arabic, or Kurdish in the case of Neo-Aramaic.
Rather, ab initio, Israeli had two primary contributors: Yiddish
and Hebrew. While Kurdish is a superstratum of Neo-Aramaic, Yiddish
is a primary contributor to Israeli. The two cases are, therefore,
not parallel.
Any credible answer to the enigma of Israeli requires an exhaustive
study of the manifold influence of Yiddish on this ‘altneulangue’
(cf. the classic Altneuland, written by Theodor Herzl, the visionary
of the Jewish State in the old-new land). The ultimate question
is whether it is possible to bring an unspoken language back to
life without the occurrence of cross-fertilization from the revivalists'
mother tongue. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish
and Hebrew were rivals to become the language of the future Jewish
state. At first sight, it appears that Hebrew has won and that Yiddish
after the Holocaust was destined to be spoken almost exclusively
by Orthodox Jews and some eccentric academics. Yet, closer scrutiny
challenges this perception. The victorious Hebrew may, after all,
be partly Yiddish at heart. In other words, Yiddish survives beneath
Israeli phonetics, phonology, syntax, lexis and even morphology,
although traditional and institutional linguists have been reluctant
to admit it.
The fourth conservative myth, the Mutual Intelligibility Myth,
dictates that Israeli is Hebrew because an Israeli speaker can understand
Hebrew. The linguist Edward Ullendorff has claimed that the biblical
Isaiah could have understood Israeli. I am not convinced that this
would have been the case. The reason Israelis can be expected to
understand the book of Isaiah – albeit with difficulties –
is surely because they study the Old Testament at school for eleven
years, rather than because it is familiar to them from their daily
conversation. Furthermore, Israelis read the bible as if it were
Israeli and often therefore misunderstand it. When an Israeli reads
yéled sha‘ashu‘ím in Jeremiah 31:19 (King
James 20), s/he does not understand it as ‘pleasant child’
but rather as ‘playboy’. Ba’u banim ‘ad
mashber in Isaiah 37:3 is interpreted by Israelis as ‘children
arrived at a crisis’ rather than as ‘children arrived
at the mouth of the womb, to be born’. The available examples
are not only lexical: Israelis are often incapable of recognizing
moods, aspects and tenses in the Bible.
Yet, Israeli children are brainwashed into believing that the Old
Testament was written in their mother tongue. In other words, in
Israeli primary schools, Hebrew and Israeli are, axiomatically,
the very same. One cannot therefore expect Israelis easily to accept
the idea that the two languages might be genetically different.
In English terms, it is as if someone were to try and tell a native
English-speaker that his/her mother tongue is not the same as Shakespeare’s.
The only difference is that between Shakespeare and the current
native speaker of English there has been a continuous chain of native
speakers. By contrast, between the biblical Isaiah and contemporary
Israelis there has been no such chain, while the Jews have had many
mother tongues other than Hebrew.
On the other hand, even if Israelis can understand some Hebrew,
that does not automatically mean that Israeli is a direct continuation
of Hebrew only. Mutual intelligibility is not so crucial in determining
the genetic affiliation of a language. After all, speakers of Modern
English cannot understand Chaucer, but no one would claim that his
language is not genetically related to contemporary English. By
contrast, a Frenchman might understand Haitian Creole but who would
argue that the latter is based only on French?
Israeli educators, as well as laymen, often argue that Israelis
‘slaughter’ or ‘rape’ their language by
‘lazily’ speaking ‘bad Hebrew’, full of
‘mistakes’ (e.g. http://www.lashon.exe.co.il). Most
Israelis say bekitá bet rather than the puristic bekhitá
bet ‘in the second grade’ (note the spirantization of
the /k/ in the latter); éser shékel rather than asar-á
shkal-ím ‘ten shekels’ (the latter having a polarity-of-gender
agreement – with a feminine numeral and a masculine plural
noun). But I believe that native speakers do not make mistakes.
Educators try to impose Hebrew grammar on Israeli speech, ignoring
the fact that Israeli has its own grammar, which is very different
from that of Hebrew.
Thus, whereas the Hebrew phrase for ‘my grandfather’
was sav-í ‘grandfather + 1st person singular possessive’,
in Israeli it is sába shel-ì ‘grandfather of
me’. Similarly, whilst Hebrew often used smikhút (construct-state),
in Israeli it is much less common. In a construct-state, two nouns
are combined, the first being modified by the second (cf. izafet
in Persian and Ottoman Turkish). Compare the Hebrew construct-state
‘em ha-yéled ‘mother the-child’ with the
Israeli phrase ha-íma shel ha-yéled ‘the mother
of the child’, both meaning ‘the child’s mother’.
Similarly, note the position of the definite article ha in the Israeli
construct-state ha-òrekh dín ‘the lawyer’
(lit. ‘the arranger of law’), as opposed to the Hebrew
construct-state ‘orékh ha-dín ‘id.’.
Similarly, most Israeli pupils say la-bet séfer ‘to
the school’ (lit. ‘to the house book’), rather
than the puristic le-vét ha-séfer.
I remember a beloved primary school teacher often lionizing the
‘right’ pronunciation of the mizrahi/Sephardi Yitzhak
Navon (former Israeli President) and Eliahu Nawi (former Mayor of
Be’er Sheva). In his famous song Aní vesímon
vemóiz hakatán, Yossi Banay writes benaaléy
shabát veková shel barét, vebeivrít
yafá im áin veim khet ‘With Sabbath shoes and
a beret hat, and in beautiful Hebrew with Ayin and with Het’,
referring to the Semitic pharyngeals [?] and [?], which most Israelis
do not pronounce but which are used, for example, by old Yemenite
Jews. I believe that the Yemenite pronunciation of áin and
khet is non-mainstream (cf. the charged term ‘non-standard’),
exactly the opposite of what Israeli children (pronouncing [none]
and kh as in Bach) are told.
The linguist Menahem Zevi Kaddari has criticized the young Israeli
author Etgar Keret for using a ‘thin language’ –
as opposed to Shmuel Yosef Agnon, for example. In fact, when Agnon
wrote ishtó méta aláv, lit. ‘his wife
died/dies on him’, he meant ‘he became a widower’
(1944, cf. 1977: 13). When Keret says so, he means ‘his wife
loves him very much’. However, the main problem here is that
Kaddari compares Keret to Agnon as if they wrote in two different
registers within the same language. However, Keret does not write
in the same language as Agnon. Whilst Agnon writes in (Mishnaic)
Hebrew, which is obviously not his mother tongue (Yiddish), Keret
writes authentically in his native Israeli language. Israelis are
not more stupid than their ancestors. Their language is not thin
and their vocabulary not poor, just different.
One can see in Kaddari’s rebuke the common phenomenon of
a conservative older generation unhappy with ‘reckless’
changes to the language – cf. Aitchison (2001). However, prescriptivism
in Israeli contradicts the usual model, where there is an attempt
to enforce the grammar and pronunciation of an elite social group.
The late linguist Haim Blanc once took his young daughter to see
an Israeli production of My Fair Lady. In this version, Professor
Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle how to pronounce /r/ ‘properly’,
i.e. as the Hebrew alveolar trill rather than as the unique Israeli
uvular approximant. The line ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly
in the plain’ is translated as barád yarád bidróm
sfarád haérev, lit. ‘Hail fell in southern Spain
this evening’. At the end of the performance, Blanc’s
daughter tellingly asked, ‘Daddy, why were they trying to
teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?’
The binary nature of Israeli has important theoretical implications
for many branches of language science: contact linguistics, sociolinguistics,
language revival/survival, linguistic genetics and typology, creolistics
and mixed languages. It demonstrates that genetic affiliation –
at least in the case of (semi-) engineered, ‘non-genetic’
languages – is not discrete but rather a continuous line.
The comparative method and lexicostatistics, though elsewhere useful,
are not here sufficient. Linguists who seek to apply the lessons
of Israeli to the revival of unspoken Australian (e.g. Amery 2000),
Austronesian and other languages should take warning.
Israeli affords insights into the politics not only of language,
but also of linguistics. One of the practical implications is that
universities, as well as Israeli secondary schools, should employ
a clear-cut distinction between Israeli linguistics and Hebrew linguistics.
Israeli children should not be indoctrinated to believe that they
speak the language of Isaiah – unless the teacher refers to
the twentieth-century Israeli polymath and visionary Isaiah Leibowitz.
Although revivalists have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity,
the language they created often mirrors the very cultural differences
they sought to erase. The study of Israeli offers a unique insight
into the dynamics between language and culture in general and in
particular into the role of language as a source of collective self-perception.
The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides the
essential background: it describes Hebrew, introduces the term ‘Israeli’
and proposes a new periodization of Hebrew and Israeli. Chapter
2 describes the current competing views about the genesis of Israeli
and suggests a new theory: hybridization. Two principles are proposed:
the ‘Founder Principle’ and the ‘Congruence Principle’.
Chapter 3 provides a sociolinguistic background and discusses the
numerous myths surrounding the language.
The second part of the book introduces and analyses the impact
of Yiddish and other European languages on Israeli in all linguistic
domains: phonetics and phonology (Chapter 4), morphology (Chapter
5), syntax (Chapter 6) and lexis (Chapter 7). Semantics is discussed
throughout. These chapters constitute a first step towards the writing
of a new grammar of the Israeli language. Up till now, many grammars
have been written but all have described Israeli as Hebrew.
Chapter 8 presents conclusions, suggests some related avenues for
further research, and – most importantly – discusses
the numerous theoretical implications of the current research for
the study of Jewish languages, contact linguistics and historical
linguistics, as well as the multiple practical implications for
the teaching of linguistics and ‘Hebrew’ at schools
and universities in Israel and world-wide.
There are four existing volumes which this book supplements or
challenges:
(1) Harshav, Benjamin 1993. Language
in Time of Revolution. Stanford (California): Stanford University
Press.
(2) Horvath, Julia and Paul Wexler (eds) 1997. Relexification
in Creole and Non-Creole Languages – With Special Attention
to Haitian Creole, Modern Hebrew, Romani,
and Rumanian (Mediterranean Language and Culture Monograph
Series, vol. xiii). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
(3) Kuzar, Ron 2001. Hebrew and Zionism:
A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study (Language, Power and Social
Process 5). Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
(4) Wexler, Paul 1990. The Schizoid
Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic
Past. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Whereas Harshav’s and Kuzar’s books are invaluable
for cultural studies, they do not provide a linguistic theory about
the genesis of the Israeli language. In fact, my book could be considered
a response to Kuzar’s as yet unanswered plea that ‘[i]n
order to understand how Israeli Hebrew emerged, a fresh perspective
is needed, free of revivalist preconceptions’ (p. 120). Wexler’s
monograph and Horvath and Wexler’s edited collection do propose
a linguistic programme which reacts against revivalism, namely ‘relexification’.
However, my own theory, which is not anti-revivalist, rejects relexification
and suggests a new theory of Israeli genesis: hybridization.
This book is of interest to (i) general linguists of all fields,
especially those working in historical, contact, typological, evolutionary
and cultural linguistics; (ii) Hebraists, Semitists, Germanists,
Slavists and Indo-Europeanists; (iii) sociologists and scholars
of culture, politics and identity; (iv) others interested in issues
of language and society.
The book is written in a style which is accessible to readers who
have no prior knowledge of Israeli. Whenever a technical term, such
as ‘construct-state’ (smikhút), is mentioned,
it is explained. There is minimal use of abbreviations and other
alienating features.
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