Language change, prescriptive language, and spontaneous speech in Modern
Hebrew
A corpus-based study of early recordings
Unlike most living languages, the use of Hebrew as a spoken
language is characterized by historical discontinuity. In this article, I
discuss certain features of spoken usage among the first generations of
speakers of Modern Hebrew (henceforth: MH), using a unique corpus – ten hours
of unstructured interviews recorded in 1956–1966 with speakers born between
1885–1925. Using these recordings, I suggest a distinction between two types
of language change:
-
Dynamic organic language change evident from the
comparison between two stages of a spoken language.
-
Disparity between the planned prescriptive language and
the spoken language used from the first few decades of MH
(henceforth: Early Modern Hebrew – EMH) through the present.
This analysis sheds light on linguistic processes reflected in
present-day Hebrew, as it allows us to distinguish between the two types of
changes. My proposal is that dynamic language changes occurred in MH only
when there is a language change among different generations of MH speakers.
This type of changes is similar to the common linguistic changes of any
other normal living language. By contrast, the second type of a change is
the linguistic differences between MH and prescriptive language (which is
based on Classical Hebrew) that do not reflect a process of normal language
change, but a partial adoption (along with partial rejection) of the
prescriptive language already by the first generations of speakers.
Article outline
- 1.Theoretical background
- 1.1The consolidation of Modern Hebrew grammar
- 1.2Types of language change in present-day Hebrew
- 1.3The corpus
- 2.Phenomena reflecting dynamic language change
- 2.1The use of the noun erec ‘land’ and derived
adjectives
- 2.1.1The attributive
arc-israʔel-i
(land-Israel-adj ‘of the land of
Israel’)
- 2.1.2xuc-l-a-ʔarc-i (outside-of-the-land-adj
‘from abroad’)
- 2.2The noun strategya (‘strategy’)
- 2.3The nominal pattern miCCaCa/ maCCeCa
- 2.3.1The noun midraxa/madrexa (‘sidewalk’)
- 2.3.2The noun maħleqa/ maħlaqa (‘department’)
- 2.3.3The noun miflaga (‘political party’)
- 3.Phenomena reflecting linguistic disparity
- 3.1Pronunciation of the function clitics
- 3.2The noun namel / namal (‘harbor’)
- 4.Mixed coexistence: Aspects of disparity and dynamic change combined
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by 2 other publications
Gonen, Einat
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Conservation or change? Exploring trends in Modern Hebrew in light of new spoken corpora of the first two generations of speakers.
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Reshef, Yael & Einat Gonen
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