Welcome to week 5 of the Bloomsbury Five Fun Facts about Languages series. Today we're looking at a West Semitic language that fell out of everyday use for almost 2,000 years; here are Five Fun Facts about Hebrew! Share your thoughts with us @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts.
1) Hebrew is historically regarded to be the language of the Hebrews or Israelites and their ancestors. Around 200 CE, Hebrew ceased to be an everyday spoken language, surviving through the medieval age only as the language of Jewish liturgy and rabbinic literature.
2) Dating to the 10th Century BCE, the Gezer calendar may be one of the oldest surviving examples of written Hebrew. Currently classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, scholars are divided as to whether the Semitic script is paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician. Written without any vowels, the calender does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it.
3) Hebrew was revived as a literary and spoken language in the 19th century. Initially the two aspects revived separately - literary Hebrew in Europe’s cities and spoken Hebrew mainly in Palestine, before beginning to merge at the start of the 1900's. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (אליעזר בן יהודה) (1858-1922), is often regarded as the "reviver of the Hebrew language.”
4) The results of Hebrew’s revival are unique. It is now the language of 9 million people across the globe, 7 million of whom live in Israel. There is no other example of a natural language without any native speakers going on to gain so many, nor of a sacred language becoming the national language of millions.
5) Hebrew sentences do not have to include verbs, as the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense is omitted. For example, the sentence "I am here" (אני פה) has only two words; one for ‘I’ (אני) and one for ‘here’ (פה).
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Swahili!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Hebrew!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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