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Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew
Edited by Edit Doron, Malka Rappaport Hovav, Yael Reshef and Moshe Taube
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 256] 2019
► pp. 201–220

Language change, prescriptive language, and spontaneous speech in Modern Hebrew

A corpus-based study of early recordings

| Tel-Aviv University

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:

  1. Dynamic organic language change evident from the comparison between two stages of a spoken language.

  2. 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
Published online: 18 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.256.08gon
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Gonen, Einat
2020. Conservation or change? Exploring trends in Modern Hebrew in light of new spoken corpora of the first two generations of speakers. Folia Linguistica 54:s41-s1 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Reshef, Yael & Einat Gonen
2018. Imperfect language learning vs. dynamic sound change. Journal of Historical Linguistics 8:2 ► pp. 169 ff. DOI logo

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