Hebrew

How Hebrew fell out of speech

Hebrew was spoken in the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah from about 1200 to 586 BCE, and the earliest Paleo-Hebrew writing dates to the 10th century BCE. After the failed Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome it declined, with Aramaic and Greek already in wide use. It lived on in liturgy, rabbinic writing, trade between Jewish communities and poetry, and Jews called it Lashon Hakodesh, the holy tongue. Abraham Garton printed the first dated Hebrew book in Reggio, Calabria, in 1475.

Who made it a mother tongue again

The Haskalah revived Hebrew as a literary language in 19th-century Germany, and the first secular Hebrew periodical, Ha-Me'assef, appeared in Königsberg from 1783. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who settled in Ottoman Palestine in 1881, set out to make the liturgical language a spoken one, through schools, textbooks and a dictionary. The immigrants of the Second Aliyah, from 1904 to 1914, gave the effort real momentum. Hebrew displaced Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and other languages of the diaspora, and some Jews called its everyday use blasphemous. The British Mandate made it one of Palestine's three official languages beside English and Arabic, and in 1948 it became official in the new State of Israel.

Where the modern standard took its sounds

Ben-Yehuda based Standard Hebrew on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi pronunciation. The first speakers were native Yiddish speakers, who brought calques and phono-semantic matchings into it. New words were drawn from the written corpus since the Bible, from Arabic and Aramaic, and from European languages. The Academy of the Hebrew Language now devises about 2,000 words a year from Hebrew roots, as alternatives to English borrowings.

Which letters carry the vowels

The script is an impure abjad: its 22 letters write consonants, and vowels appear as dots and dashes above or below them, or through consonant letters doubling as vowels. The square letters, called Ashurit, grew from the Aramaic script, while the older Paleo-Hebrew alphabet resembled Phoenician. A rounder cursive is used for handwriting, and a medieval cursive underlies Rashi script.