Ver. 15.0
December 27, 2009
History of the Ancient and Modern Hebrew
Language
By David Steinberg
David.Steinberg@houseofdavid.ca
Home page http://www.houseofdavid.ca/
·
Excursus 4 - Growth in the Number and Range of Israeli Hebrew
Verbs
·
Excursus 5 - New Word Formation
·
Excursus 6 - Changes in Syntax
Excursus 4
Growth in the Number and Range of Israeli Hebrew Verbs
There
are two main methods:
1. By
extracting 3 or 4 consonant roots out of Hebrew or foreign nouns and forming
verbs in the piel/pual/hitpael forms. E.g. from telephone the verb tilfen
and from torpedo tirped
2.
For most roots, only 2 or 3 of the 7 main stems were in use in pre-modern
Hebrew. Israeli Hebrew has been able to massively activate unused
forms in order to create variants on the root idea. E.g. classically זרק was
used in the kal stem meaning to cast. Now it is still used in kal for
that idea but is also used , on the analogy of European languages, in
hiphil/huphal to mean to give (hiphil ) or receive (huphal) an injection. (See
Tene in
Select Bibliography below)
Israeli
Hebrew has taken many inherited resources and regularized their uses to enable
it to closely parallel modern European languages. A few items of note:
o
wide use of suffixes such as וּת to form abstract nouns and ֽי to freely form adjectives
o
use of what are essentially prefixes to freely form adverbs
e.g. באופן
o
the use of inherited particles in ways that closely
parallel the usages of European languages e.g. אֽי, בֽלְתֽי
For
details see Glinert
1989
.
Changes in Syntax
In
Mishnaic and Israeli Hebrew Biblical Hebrew’s
richly varied uses of the infinitives largely disappears (see Gesenius pp
339-355; Williams, Segal p. 54 and Glinert in
Select Bibliography).
The infinitive construct prefixed by ל is now used mainly in ways analogous
to the English infinitive. Also, in Mishnaic and Israeli Hebrew the “consecutive
tenses”
have disappeared thus changing the look and feel of the language drastically.
Kutscher
(see Select Bibliography below) wrote
“H
Rosén
has noted a … phenomenon which has
changed the whole makeup of Israeli Hebrew – its syntax.
“The development of the “period” with its many
subordinate clauses has made Israeli Hebrew flexible enough to be employed like
any other modern (i.e. European) language. …
Biblical Hebrew is to a large extent paratactic, i.e. it prefers to coordinate
sentences, (a start in the development of the modern structure was made by)
Mishnaic Hebrew (which) is much more syntactic, making use of the subordinating
ש (she)
in all kinds of subordination.”
For
more detailed discussion of some issues see Studies in Modern Hebrew Syntax
and Semantics ed., North-Holland Linguistic Series 32 1976 Peter Cole
Is Israeli Hebrew Unique in Being a Western Language
(semantics, use of tenses etc.) Under a Semitic Skin (grammar, vocabulary,
semantics, syntax)?
Interestingly,
a well respected scholar of both Hebrew and Arabic has shown the Modern
Standard Arabic has developed in ways very closely paralleling developments in
Israeli Hebrew. See Joshua Blau's book "The Renaissance of Modern
Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic" (Berkeley: UC Press, 1981.