The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past (Mediterranean Language and Culture Monograph Series,)

Hebrew is a Slavic language containing a largely Germanic vocabulary imported via Yiddish. 0 INTRODUCTION 1 0.1 Transcription and transliteration 8 1 THE OLD VIEW: MODERN HEBREW IS A SEMITIC LANGUAGE 9 1.1 The "miracle" of the Modern Hebrew revival 13 1.2 The relationship of Modern Hebrew to pre-revival Hebrew 17 1.3 Non-Hebrew Semitic influences in Modern Hebrew 27 1.4 Yiddish and "Common European" influences in Modern Hebrew 30 2 THE NEW VIEW: MODERN HEBREW IS A SLAVIC LANGUAGE 36 2.1 The "miracle" of the Modern Hebrew revival: a reassessment 46 2.2 The relationship of Modern Hebrew to pre-revival Hebrew: a reassessment 46 2.3 Non-Hebrew Semitic influences in Modern Hebrew: a reassessment 46 2.4 Yiddish and "Common European" influences in Modem Hebrew: a reassessment 54 2.41 The attitudes of Modern Hebrew language planners towards the Hebrew resources of Yiddish 55 2.42 The role of Yiddish in the recovery of old colloquial Hebrew 57 2.43 The "hidden Slavic standard" in Modern Hebrew 72 3 TAKING STOCK: IMPLICATIONS FOR HEBREW AND THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS 98 3.1 Conclusions 98 3.2 Topics for future research 121 4 ABBREVIATIONS 131 5 REFERENCES 133 Hebrew is regarded as a former living language which ceased to be a native language 1800 years ago, only to be given a spoken function anew in the late 19th century. Since the re-acquisition of a lost colloquial function has never been documented, Modern Hebrew has become an object of fascination among linguists and laymen alike.In this book the author claims- Modern Hebrew is not a direct continuation of monolingual Semitic Hebrew- Modern Hebrew was created when Yiddish speaker re-lexified their language to Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew- Yiddish is a Slavic language, derived from Sorbian and thus, Modern Hebrew is a Slavic LanguageThese claims raise a number of interesting why do most speakers believe that Modern Hebrew is a Semitic language, what are the contributions of Modern Hebrew to the typology of diglossia, historical and genetic linguistics, universal grammar, 2nd language acquisition and political science?