How about those constructions and words coined after European ways of saying? I know very little Hebrew, but I remember that in the formative state of Ivrit many abstract substantives ending on -ut were created to cover the needs of modern times, and even words like renaissance were just borrowed, as rnsns. Which by the way I learned from the book of an Israeli soldier in Florence, who I admired very much, a little stunned by her daring, as she travelled all alone through Europe to friends in the Netherlands. Amazing girl, proud, brave, intelligent.
Posted by Folquerto at August 5, 2005 05:33 PMhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic lists parallels for most or all of these classical-modern differences: loss of mood distinctions, simplification of agreement patterns, analytic possessive, loss or replacement of pharangeals. Zuckermann says several times that the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers is a basic difference of Hebrew. But the end product seems to be about the same. Perhaps it's because the colloquial Arabic varieties arose when Arabic was learned by local non-Arabic speakers. Or, vernacular Arabic-vernacular Hebrew parallels could be the result of borrowing from each other, vernacular Aramaic, or other languages.
It would be nice if Zuckermann could list features specific to Yiddish that appear in today's Hebrew, but he lists only generically European ones. Europeanized features are easy to find even in Modern Chinese.
Posted by caffeind at August 7, 2005 06:40 PMcaffeing, I haven't read the linked article, but ...
I think once comment argument on the Israeli / Yiddish connection is that specific semitic features (derivation of tri-consonant roots, broken plurals) are no longer productive (or only minimally so).
I don't know enough about Hebrew to say whether or not that's true.
As for the classical/colloquial split in Arabic, the last I knew people were starting to think that the diglossia has always been there, that is that both a high and low form were exported from the Arabian peninsula. This is based on things that all the colloquials have in common (against classical Arabic, like negation (la before the verb in classical, but in all the colloquials, it's either ma before the verb, -sh after the verb or both together.
Posted by michael farris at August 8, 2005 04:23 AMDear Caffeind,
I have been referred to you by a colleague of mine who says that you are asking me about the difference between the European influence on ("non-genetic"!) Israeli and the European influence on Arabic and other ("genetic"!) languages.
From the point of view of TYPOLOGY, or *synchronic* characterization of language, you are right: there are indeed some similarities between the European impact on Israeli and that on some vernacular Arabics.
However, from the *diachronic* point of view of GENETICS - which is currently of interest to me - the two cases are not paprallel. Comparing Israeli to Semitic languages characterized by both Indo-European traits (like Israeli) and a continuous chain of native speakers (unlike Israeli) is problematic.
The formation of Israeli was NOT the result of language contact between spoken Hebrew and a powerful superstratum, such as English in the case of some vernacular Arabics, Kurdish in the case of Neo-Aramaic, or French in the case of English. Rather, *ab initio*, Israeli, which is only 100 years old, had several contributors: Yiddish, Hebrew and some other spoken languages. The unique case of Israeli is, therefore, not parallel to Greek, Japanese or Chinese.
It looks as if Eliezer Ben-Yehuda - *symbolically* the "father of Israeli" - would have liked to have cancelled the heritage of the Diaspora and would have been most content had Israelis spoken Biblical Hebrew. Had the Hebrew revival been successful, they would indeed have spoken a language closer to ancient Hebrew than Modern English is to Chaucer, because they would have bypassed more than 2000 years of natural development.
On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that Hebrew never died as a spoken language by the second century AD. It continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews. They eventually returned to the Land of Israel (or Palestine) continuing to speak Hebrew. It might well be the case that THAT Hebrew would have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does Israeli. But this fact says nothing about the genetics of actual Israeli!
The following is a summary of my thoughts, which I have formulated for you. It is related to my forthcoming book haivrit kemitos (Hebrew as Myth, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2005):
Fascinating and multifaceted, Israeli (Zuckermann 1999) possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the cultural linguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language and politics, and practical matters, e.g. whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language.
Hebrew was spoken by the Jewish people after the so-called conquest of Canaan (c. fourteenth century BC). It belonged to the Canaanite division of the north-western branch of Semitic languages. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judaea in AD 132-5, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated, marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. But the actual end of spoken Hebrew might have been earlier. Jesus, for example, was a native speaker of Aramaic rather than Hebrew. For more than 1700 years thereafter, Hebrew was comatose. It served as liturgical and literary language and occasionally also as a lingua franca for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a mother tongue.
Unlike Maskilic Hebrew (i.e. the Hebrew of the Haskalah, the 1770-1880 Enlightenment Movement led by Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Herz Wessely), a literary language, Israeli is a living mother tongue. Its formation was facilitated in Eretz Yisrael only at the end of the nineteenth century by the most famous revival ideologue Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), school teachers and enthusiastic supporters. Itamar Ben-Avi (1882-1943, born as Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda), Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s son, is symbolically considered to have been the first native Israeli-speaker. He was born one year after Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a native Yiddish-speaker, conversant in Russian and French, arrived in Eretz Yisrael.
But it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that Israeli was first spoken by a community, which makes it approximately 100 years old. The first children born to two Israeli-speaking parents were those of couples who were graduates of the first Israeli schools in Eretz Yisrael, and who had married in the first decade of the twentieth century (see Rabin 1981: 54). In April 2000, the oldest native Israeli-speaker was Dola Wittmann (in her late 90s), Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s daughter, who also happens to be one of the first native Israeli-speakers.
Israeli is currently one of the official languages – with Arabic and English – of the State of Israel (established in 1948) and is spoken to varying degrees of fluency by its 6.8 million citizens – as a mother tongue by most Jews (whose total number slightly exceeds 5 million), and as a second language by Muslims (Arabic-speakers), Christians (e.g. Russian- and Arabic-speakers), Druze (Arabic-speakers) and others.
During the past century, Israeli has become the primary mode of communication 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.
Issues of language are so sensitive in Israel that politicians are often involved. In a session at the Israeli Parliament on 4 January 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rebuked Israelis for using the etymologically Arabo-English hybrid expression yàla báy, lit. ‘let’s bye’, i.e. ‘goodbye’, instead of ‘the most beautiful word’ shalóm ‘peace, hello, goodbye’. In an article in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz (21 June 2004), the left-wing (and thus often regarded by some as ‘enlightened’) politician Yossi Sarid attacked the common language of éser shékel (‘ten shekels’, rather than asar-á shkal-ím ‘ten-f shekel-mpl’, the latter having a polarity-of-gender agreement – with a feminine numeral and a masculine plural noun) as inarticulate and monstrous, and urged civilians to fight it and protect ‘Hebrew’.
One could see in these rebukes the common nostalgia of a conservative older generation unhappy with ‘reckless’ changes to the language – cf. Aitchison (2001) and Hill (1998). But normativism in Israeli contradicts the usual ‘do not split your infinitives’ model, where there is an attempt to enforce the grammar and pronunciation of an elite social group. Using a ‘do as I say, don’t do as I do’ approach, Ashkenazic Jews (most of them originally
native Yiddish-speakers), who have usually controlled key positions in Israeli society, have urged Israelis to adopt the pronunciation of Sephardic Jews (many of them originally native Arabic-speakers), who happen to have been socio-economically disadvantaged. In fact, politicians, educators and many laymen are attempting 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, 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, characteristic of Sephardim (cf. Judaeo-Spanish, Italian, Spanish), rather than as the Israeli unique lax uvular approximant (cf. many Yiddish and German dialects). The line ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ was adapted 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, ‘Abba, why was Professor Higgins trying to teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?’
The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since the beginning of the twentieth century. The still prevalent, traditional view suggests that Israeli is Semitic: (Biblical/Mishnaic) Hebrew revived (e.g. Rabin 1974). The revisionist position defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified, i.e. Yiddish, most revivalists’ máme lóshn (mother tongue), is the ‘substratum’, whilst Hebrew is only a ‘superstratum’ providing lexicon and frozen morphology (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997).
From time to time it is alleged that Hebrew never died (e.g. Haramati 1992, 2000, Chomsky 1957: 218). It is true that, throughout its literary history, Hebrew was used as an occasional lingua franca. However, between the second and nineteenth centuries it was no one’s mother tongue, and I believe that the development of a literary language is very different from that of a fully-fledged native language. But there are many linguists who, though rejecting the ‘eternal spoken Hebrew mythology’, still explain every linguistic feature in Israeli as if Hebrew never died. For example, Goldenberg (1996: 151-8) suggests that Israeli pronunciation originates from internal convergence and divergence within Hebrew.
I wonder, however, how a literary language can be subject to the same phonetic and phonological processes as a mother tongue. I argue, rather, that the Israeli sound system continues the (strikingly similar) phonetics and phonology of Yiddish, the native language of almost all the revivalists. These revivalists very much wished to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, like Arabs. However, they could not avoid the Ashkenazic Weltanschauung – and consonants – arising from their European background.
Unlike the traditionalist and revisionist, my own hybridizational theory acknowledges the historical and linguistic continuity of both Semitic and Indo-European languages within Israeli. ‘Genetically modified’, semi-engineered Israeli is based simultaneously on Hebrew and Yiddish (both being primary contributors – rather than ‘substrata’), accompanied by a plethora of other contributors such as Russian, Polish, German, Judaeo-Spanish (‘Ladino’) Arabic and English. Therefore, the term ‘Israeli’ is far more appropriate than ‘Israeli Hebrew’, let alone ‘Modern Hebrew’ or ‘Hebrew’ (tout court).
What makes the ‘genetics’ of Israeli grammar so complex is the fact that the combination of Semitic and Indo-European influences is a phenomenon occurring already within the primary (and secondary) contributors to Israeli. Yiddish, a Germanic language with Romance, Hebrew and Aramaic substrata (and with most dialects having undergone Slavonicization), was shaped by Hebrew and Aramaic. On the other hand, Indo-European languages, such as Greek, played a role in (Semitic) Hebrew. Moreover, before the emergence of Israeli, Yiddish and other European languages influenced Medieval and Maskilic variants of Hebrew (see Glinert 1991), which, in turn, influenced Israeli (in tandem with the European contribution). This adds to the importance of the Congruence Principle, according to which if a linguistic feature exists in more than one contributor, it is more likely to persist in the Target Language (Zuckermann 2003).
The distinction between forms and patterns (Zuckermann 2005, 2007) is crucial too. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá, ‘the language defendants regiment’ (see Shur 2000), whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít ‘Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew!’, used to tear down signs written in ‘foreign’ languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, the members of this group did not look for Yiddish and Standard Average European patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak ‘Hebrew’. (The term ‘Standard Average European’, SAE, was first introduced by Whorf (1941: 25) and recently received more attention by Haspelmath (1998, 2001) and Bernini and Ramat (1996) – cf. ‘European Sprachbund’ in Kuteva (1998).)
This is, obviously, not to say that the revivalists, had they paid attention to patterns, would have managed to neutralize the impact of their mother tongues, which was often subconscious (hence the term ‘semi-engineered’). As Mufwene observes, ‘linguistic change is inadvertent, a consequence of “imperfect replication” in the interactions of individual speakers as they adapt their communicative strategies to one another or to new needs’ (2001: 11). Although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the language the revivalists ‘created’ often mirrors the very cultural differences they sought to erase (cf. mutatis mutandis Frankenstein’s monster). The alleged victory of Hebrew over Yiddish was, in fact, a Pyrrhic one. Victorious Hebrew is, after all, partly European at heart. Yiddish and SAE survive beneath ‘osmotic’ Israeli grammar.
I strongly believe that had the revivalists been Arabic-speaking Jews (e.g. from Morocco), Israeli would have been a totally different language – both genetically and typologically, much more Semitic. The impact of the founder population on Israeli is incomparable with that of later immigrants. The following is how Zelinsky (1973: 13-14) describes the influence of first settlements, from the point of view of cultural geography:
"Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance to the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been [...] in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants generations later."
Harrison et al. (1988) discuss the ‘Founder Effect’ in biology and human evolution, and Mufwene (2001) applies it as a creolistic tool to explain why the structural features of so-called creoles (which he regards as ‘normal languages’ just like English) are largely predetermined by the characteristics of the languages spoken by the founder population, i.e. by the first colonists. I propose the following Founder Principle in the context of Israeli:
Yiddish is a primary contributor to Israeli because it was the mother tongue of the vast majority of revivalists and first pioneers in Eretz Yisrael at the CRUCIAL period of the beginning of Israeli.
The Founder Principle works because by the time later immigrations came to Israel, Israeli had already entrenched the fundamental parts of its grammar. Thus, Moroccan Jews arriving in Israel in the 1950s had to learn a fully-fledged language (even though it often did not appear so to the Hebrew-obsessed language planners). Obviously, they initially developed their own variety of Israeli but ultimately the influence of their mother tongue was relatively negligible. Wimsatt’s (1999a, 1999b) notion of ‘generative entrenchment’ is of relevance here. As Salikoko Mufwene puts it, ‘the oldest features have a greater chance of prevailing over some newer alternatives simply because they have acquired more and more carriers, hence more transmitters, with each additional generation of speakers’
(2001: 29).
At the same time – and unlike anti-revivalist revisionists – I suggest that lethargic liturgical Hebrew too fulfills the criteria of a primary contributor for the following reasons: (i) Despite millennia without native speakers, it persisted as a most important cultural, literary and liturgical language throughout the generations; (ii) Revivalists made a huge effort to revive it and were, in fact, partly successful.
Still, the revivalists’ attempt to belie their European roots, negate diasporism and avoid hybridity (as, in fact, reflected in Yiddish itself) failed. Thus, 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. Linguists and community leaders seeking to apply the lessons of Israeli in the hope of reviving no-longer spoken languages (e.g. Amery 1994, 1995, 2000; cf. Clyne 2001; Fishman 1991, 2001; Thieberger 1988) should take warning. When one revives a language, even at best one should expect to end up with a hybrid. I maintain that Israeli is a ‘non-genetic’, layered language, only partially engineered. Whatever we choose to call it, we should acknowledge, and celebrate, its complexity.
(Unfortunately, I may not be able to retort to your follow-up, if any)
Yours respectfully,
Ghil`ad Zuckermann
http://www.zuckermann.org/
[Misspellings of author's name: gilad zuckerman ghi'ad zukermann ghilad zukerman galahad sugarman gilead superman]
Posted by Dr Ghil`ad Zuckermann at August 8, 2005 09:13 PMDr. Zuckermann: Thanks very much for your informative comment; I'm particularly pleased to learn about Dola Wittmann, who will be the subject of my next post now that I've googled her. (Love the list of misspellings too, Dr. Superman!)
Posted by language hat at August 9, 2005 09:16 AMThank you, dr. Zuckermann! I will read you, I downloaded and printed three articles by your hand. I love Borges too. And Mandarin. Some thirty years ago the Israeli girl in Florence, by the way she was called Iris, a Greek name, told me that she had a younger sister with a biblical name derived from the ancient Egyptian word for sister (sn.t), which name she and her family pronounced as Asnat. They were Jews of European descent. She informed me that in Israel a struggle was going on between the pronounciations Osnat and Asnat. I knew where that difference originated, so I was not amazed. From your words I understand that this struggle still remains and is in a way getting fiercer, as Israeli tends to arabify. At least, that is the last thing I heard about it at the university (Leiden, the Netherlands, Nino institute, Hebrew and Aramaic section). Well, there's many a language nowadays in state of far-going flux and Hebrew carries a really heavy load of history! We'll see. Which means in this case that I do not expect to see the end of it, nor do I find that disconcerting. Rather amusing, like when I understood that the children of my brother Jack are full-blooded Jews according to orthodox Jewish law. Not everyone finds that just amusing, I know. But, thanks!
Posted by Folquerto at August 11, 2005 06:50 PMThe transcripts of the radio programs are now up at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1417557.htm (part 1) and http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1422332.htm (part 2).
And I couldn't resist referring to a Language Log post on one particular difference of vocabulary between Hebrew and Israeli: "Begin arming Israel" http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001728.html
Posted by anthony at August 15, 2005 12:02 AMWhat Len Prager says there about Ghil`ad Zuckermann's theory is insightful. For example, "Zuckermann by no means denies the productive powers and expressive capacity of the language of the State of Israel commonly called Hebrew."
http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr09/tmr09013.htm
Date: 29 December 2005
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: This issue of TMR
Ghil'ad Zuckermann's new book, Hebrew As Myth [Am Oved] will be published shortly and he here gives a refined restatement of the argument he presented polemically in his reply to the Forward's Philologus in TMR 8.013 (December 2004). [See http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmr/tmr08013.htm]. Zuckermann commands a position midway between the traditionalists -- semiticists largely who cling to the view of continuous development of a Hebrew language from biblical times to today -- and the "revisionists" for whom Hebrew is relexified Indo-European. Zuckermann states squarely: "Israeli is a hybrid language based on both Hebrew and Yiddish" as well as on many other languages. Since his copious review of the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary (in the International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1999): 325-346) -- and probably before -- Zuckermann has wrangled with the glottonomy issue and it has unnecessarily won him sharp critics. Zuckermann by no means denies the productive powers and expressive capacity of the language of the State of Israel commonly called Hebrew. He insists on both its Indo-European and Semitic origins, its immense debt to Yiddish, its essential newness -- and his name for it: "Israeli." He concludes: "Whatever we choose to call it, we should acknowledge, and celebrate, its complexity." The appearance of Zuckermann's new book will doubtless stimulate much discussion.
[...]
2)----------------------------------------------
Date: 29 December 2005
From: Ghil'ad Zuckermann
Subject: The Israeli Language
[Rest of comment deleted because it's copied from here, where you can read it if you desire -- LH.]
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