Revivals

I spent part of yesterday afternoon, that is to say Monday afternoon, on the paper at reference 1 about Israeli by Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, an academic who was born in Israel but who has spent quality time in quality institutions elsewhere and is now Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide – with a special interest in Aboriginal languages.

Turned up because I wanted to read about a phenomenon called calque (of reference 8), one instance of which being the fact that the French for honeymoon is obtained by a literal translation of the English – or vice versa. A phrase with a conventional meaning, rather than a meaning which can be deduced from the words themselves, but a convention which has been found convenient in both languages. Is seems that there is plenty of this in Israeli, Zuckermann’s preferred term for the version of Hebrew now spoken in Israel.

What with it being rather technical and my being rather hampered by no prior knowledge of Hebrew, I eventually gave up. But an interesting paper nonetheless.

He points out that Israeli is a very successful revival, probably the most successful in the world. Most people in Israel use it in their everyday lives. But his conclusion is that it is misleading to claim that Israeli, the language spoken in Israel today, is a straightforward, direct descendant of the Hebrew last spoken around two thousand years ago. Israeli is a hybrid built from both written Hebrew and spoken Yiddish, plus a whole lot of stuff from German, Polish, Russian – and English. The first three of these last reflecting the origins of many of the early Jewish settlers in what is now Israel, the fourth the pervasiveness of English. Bound to be a big source when trying to put an ancient language back on its feet. So while a lot of the form of Israeli is Hebrew, a lot of what Zuckermann calls the pattern is from elsewhere. Hence, for example, the many calques.

Going further, I think that Zuckermann does not care for the way the guardians of the language – the people of references 4 and 5 – are trying to corral a living language into an ancient mould. People whom he says are sometimes satisfied with a Hebrew form, without looking very carefully at the pattern. People who are sometimes dismissive of the language and traditions of the central European diaspora. Or, indeed, those of North Africa and the Middle East; those of the Muslim rather than the Christian world. While I associated to what I understand to be the rather similar activities, responding to the onslaught of English and American on French as it should be, of l’Académie française, to be found at reference 6.

But he starts by pointing out that Hebrew was not spoken for everyday purposes for getting on for 2,000 years. At which point I thought that English has changed rather a lot in half that time, with the English of late first millennium Saxons being more or less unintelligible to anyone other than a specialist in such matters. Just try reading ‘Beowulf’ in the original if you are not sure about this.

With the snap above being the first page of an early manuscript version of Beowulf held by the British museum.

He then points out that many of the early evangelists for the revival of Hebrew, from say the late nineteenth century, were Yiddish speakers. Likely speakers of Russian, Polish or German too. So it would be surprising if those languages did not creep in, in one way or another.

In which connection, he proposes the Congruence Principle, according to which if a feature exists in more than one contributing language, it is more likely to persist in the emerging language. This goes with the Founder Principle which asserts that, 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 time when Israeli was coming to be. They shaped the language, and those that came after, in large part, fell into line.

He then goes through a long list of features of Israeli which bear on this thesis. 

One of the items on this list was that while Hebrew was a synthetic language with lots of declensions and conjugations, Israeli was much more analytic language with lots of articles and particles, in the way of many European languages. 

Another is that while Hebrew had the copula (of reference 7, often in English some form of the verb ‘to be’), it was not widely used. While it is much more used in Israeli, following Yiddish and much European usage.

Another is that Israeli, unlike Hebrew, is what Zuckermann calls a habere language (from the Latin for ‘to have’) in that the thing had or possessed is marked as an accusative, a direct object, as in the English ‘I hit him’, with English pronouns, unlike most nouns, having an accusative case. While Yiddish has ‘to have’ and allows both forms.

But the list was too much for me and I was struggling by the time that I got to what Zuckermann calls verbal templates and others call Binyanim, snapped above. Notwithstanding, his argument did seem rather convincing.

I was left wondering whether there are scholars out there doing the same thing for the Gaelic and Celtic languages of these islands – thinking particularly of the efforts of the Irish to preserve and promote their Gaelic, which is different from Hebrew and Israeli in that it was widely spoken in parts of Ireland until relatively recently. The written record may not be as long, but there is an oral tradition which was lost from Hebrew – and which is being created anew in Israeli.

Another difference is that Israeli is now the dominant language in Israel, whereas my understanding is that in Ireland, everyone does Gaelic at school, rather as many of us here in England used to do Latin, but few people use it for everyday purposes.

References

Reference 1: Hybridity Versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns – Ghil‘ad Zuckermann – 2009.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghil'ad_Zuckermann. 

Reference 3: https://hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_Ten/Introduction/introduction.html. The source of the opening snap above, turned up as I needed help with what Zuckermann called verbal templates.

Reference 4: https://hebrew-academy.org.il/. In Hebrew.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_the_Hebrew_Language. 

Reference 6: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/. 

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics). 

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque.