Languages of Judaism

Hebrew, Aramaic, Ladino,

Yiddish, and Yinglish

Sacred Languages: Languages of Sacred Scriptures

• Hinduism: Sanskrit (Vedas)

• Judaism: Hebrew (Tanakh)

• Christianity: Greek (New Testament)

• Islam Arabic (Qur’an)

Map of Semitic Heartland

Chart of Semitic languages

Map: Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia

Map: Hittites, Mitanni, Egypt

Map: Afro Asiatic Family

Core features of Hebrew and other Semitic languages

• Pharyngeal consonants (absent from modern Hebrew)

• Triliterate roots• Noun morphology: 3 cases (now

disappearing)• Verb morphology:

– complex derivation from simple roots– Gender inflection in 2nd and 3rd persons

Four phases of Hebrew

• Biblical (Classical) Hebrew, till 3rd c. BCE.– Aramaic replaced it as the spoken language

• Mishnaic (Rabbinic) Hebrew: written in 200 C.E. – Never the spoken language of the people

• Medieval Hebrew: 6th to 13th century.– Borrowings from Greek, Arabic, Spanish

• Modern Hebrew

Medieval Hebrew

• Poetry (piyuttim)

• Creation of thousands of new terms using Hebrew roots.

The phonology of Hebrew

• When no longer a spoken language, people pronounced (or mispronounced) it on the basis of Diaspora languages

• Two possible sources of phonological influence: Yiddish and Arabic.

• Ashkenazic Hebrew based on Yiddish phonology.• Sephardic Hebrew based on Arabic phonology

Israeli Hebrew: a phonological mishmash

• The State of Israel tried to adopt the Sephardic pronunciation.

• But there was phonological interference from European languages– Couldn’t pronounce pharyngeal sounds (‘ayin

and Het)– Used the Yiddish uvular “r”.

• Elite mispronunciations became the norm.

Examples of problem words

• Ani rotse lagur b’erets israel (I want to live in the land of Israel)

• Arba>im (forty)• Qaniti lachem leHem. (I bought bread for

you.)• Machar (he sold) and maHar (tomorrow)The mispronunciation of the Ashkenazim has

now become “higher class” Hebrew.

Hebrew alphabet

• Sounds, not idiographs

• Only consonants. Vowels not represented until later. (Masoretic vowel points).

• Written from right to left

• Some letters have a different form if they are word-final

Semitic alphabets

Semitic alphabets, cont’d

“In the beginning…”as in the Torah scroll

“In the beginning…”with vowels and cantillation