The paper examines the opposition of existential-possessive constructions with le- ‘to’, the inherited strategy in Hebrew for denoting possession, and similar constructions with ecel ‘at’. The latter, induced by several languages in contact with Hebrew throughout its history (Arabic, Yiddish, Russian), began to encroach upon the domain of the former at various stages of the language, including Emerging Modern Hebrew, but ended up being relegated to other functions. The paper surveys the functions of ecel in Modern Hebrew and examines the question of why this contact-induced construction did not become entrenched as the dominant existential-possessive construction.
This paper documents the evolution of existential possessive modals in a literary corpus of Emergent Modern Hebrew (EMH). Modal uses of the existential element yeš are shown to have changed their form and their meaning during this period. Morphosyntactically, the possessive variant declined, and it became impossible to inflect modal yeš. Semantically, a special meaning of ability that was available in the classical Hebrew variants of the construction was lost, and modal yeš turned into an expression that exclusively conveys impersonal deontic necessity. Language contact, primarily with Russian, is suggested to have shaped the morphosyntax of existential possessive modals in EMH, whereas internally-motivated processes based on the inherited semantics may explain the meaning modal yeš ultimately developed. On this view, the grammar of Modern Hebrew exhibits recombination of features from languages in contact at the time of language revival.
This paper traces the way ʕadayin ‘still’ in Modern Hebrew (MH) emerged as a new concessive, developing out of an earlier aspectual adverb which originated in Rabbinic Hebrew, after being borrowed from Aramaic. The account adopted here provides us with the means to describe and analyze the process of ʕadayin’s reanalysis in MH, which is claimed to have been triggered by the use of ʕadayin in adversative sentences opening with ʔaval ‘but’ at the time Hebrew began to be influenced by English. The input of the presupposition of ʔaval ‘but’ is taken into account as the major contribution to the process of reanalysis, along with the original focus-sensitivity and anaphoricity of ʕadayin.
This paper addresses a phenomenon in colloquial Modern Hebrew: the use of the future form of the verb rather than the imperative form to convey a command. In Biblical Hebrew both forms are used to convey commands, but in Modern Hebrew the use of the future form of the verb to express commands is confined to the informal register. The distribution of the forms in Biblical Hebrew and in Modern Hebrew is shown to be dramatically different. This suggests that the phenomenon in Modern Hebrew does not have its roots in Biblical Hebrew. Further historical survey indicates that it is a relatively new development. From this historical survey I conclude that the use of the future to express a command in Modern Hebrew has its roots in Rabbinic Hebrew of the 18th and 19th centuries and that the underlying factors which brought this situation about are a process of what is sometimes called ‘insubordination’ and system simplification.
The paper discusses a change in the typological profile of Hebrew in terms of lexicalization patterns. These patterns concern the way in which the conceptual components of event descriptions of motion or change are distributed across morpho-syntactic categories when they include in addition in addition a specification of manner in the same nuclear clause. V-framed languages require the verb to express the motion or change, and manner, if expressed, must be expressed otherwise. S-framed languages allow the verb to express the manner and the motion or change to be expressed by a satellite such as a prepositional phrase. Biblical Hebrew is shown to have properties of V-framed languages, while Modern Hebrew shows properties of S-framed languages. The article shows that Hebrew first developed a locative/directional distinction, allowing manner verbs of a variety of sorts to appear with directional phrases. More recently, constructions with non-subcategorized objects have begun to appear. The article shows that these constructions developed from reanalyses of Classical Hebrew collocations.
The formation of the colloquial register of Modern Hebrew has been customarily attributed to the effects of speech revival. Based on an extensive textual examination of pre-modern texts, this paper suggests that some of the most conspicuous features of contemporary colloquial usage in fact reflect continuity with pre-existing linguistic habits which were well-rooted among Jewish writers prior to speech revival. These features were naturally transferred to speech by first generation L2 speakers, but due to their incompatibility with the classical models (on which literary language as well as linguistic education were based), they were interpreted by native-born L1 speakers as bearing a colloquial flavor. Recognition of this process sheds new light on the formation processes of Modern Hebrew. Moreover, it may have more general implications for our understanding of the mechanisms of language change, as it indicates that colloquial language does not have to be formed by actual speakers, but can be the result of language development that occurred in periods where the language was only used for writing.
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.
The paper assesses the influence on Modern Hebrew of the two previous spoken stages of Hebrew: Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew in its early, Mishnaic, phase. Contra the received view in the current literature, I argue that Modern Hebrew has in many respects readopted the syntax of Biblical Hebrew, the earlier of the two ancient stages, rather than being a development of the subsequent Rabbinic stage. The paper discusses particular constructions whose Biblical syntax had historically been replaced by Rabbinic syntax, yet were reinstated in Modern Hebrew. These include clausal constructions such as conditional and unconditional clauses, clausal complements of aspectual and modal auxiliaries, and gerundive clauses. The Rabbinic component in the syntax of Modern Hebrew seems to be limited to values and exponents drawn from Rabbinic Hebrew for the functional categories originating in Biblical Hebrew or in languages with which Hebrew was in contact during its history.
The paper argues that contact-induced change is no more unusual or “inorganic” than any sort of language change, and that it does not affect the basic continuity that language transmission across generations ensures. Language continuity depends on an unbroken line of transmission, which may be preserved not only in cases of system-internal changes, but also in changes induced by language contact, even in creoles and mixed languages. The paper illustrates these points by examining three cases of language contact: Judezmo (Judeo-Spanish spoken by Jewish communities in the Balkans before World War II); the Constantinople Judeo-Greek dialect of the 16th century; the diglossia in 19th century Greece between Demotic and Katharevousa.
It is often assumed that creole languages represent ‘exceptional’ language development in which a contact language or a variety largely spoken by late L2 learners nativizes and becomes the main language of a community. It is therefore not uncommon that scholars of contact languages or revitalized languages (e.g., Hebrew) ask whether such languages are creoles or not. The common assumption is that so-called creoles exhibit certain specific linguistic features which distinguish them from other non-creolized languages, and which could be used as a yardstick to evaluate the status of other languages as creoles. But, what if any given language is a creolized form of a pre-existing language spoken by previous generations? In this paper, I argue that language acquisition always happens in a situation of contact comparable to creole contexts, in which learners are faced with heterogeneous inputs and recombine competing linguistic features into new linguistic items. Under this view, all natural languages involve a hybrid grammar. I further discuss how recombination leads to linguistic variation both at the learner’s and population level.
Languages are constantly formed and changed by the opposing forces of variation and conventionalization. Yet it is not clear whether one of the two forces is prior to the other in language emergence, nor do we know how the two interact early in the life of a language. By comparing two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), both about 90 years old, we argue that the initial stages of a language are characterized by great variation. Conventionalization ensues, but it does not proceed in a unified manner in all linguistic domains of a language or in all languages equally; some domains and structures conventionalize before others, and in some languages the drive towards conventionalization is stronger than in others. We provide evidence for the claim that the drive towards conventionalization is the result of various socio-linguistic factors, such as time, the expansion of the community, the expansion of language use to new communicative domains, and the need to signal social identity.
This paper examines the socio-linguistic situation and mechanisms that led to diachronic changes in the syntax of Eastern Yiddish, such as the emergence of embedded Verb-Second. Following Weinreich (1958), Santorini (1989, 1992) and my earlier work (Pereltsvaig 2017), I analyze these changes as resulting from contact with Slavic languages. Furthermore, I argue that contact involved interference through shift and “Pattern replication” (in Matras and Sakel’s 2007 terminology) rather than borrowing or “Matter replication”. In addition, I propose that the “shifters” to Yiddish who introduced Slavic grammatical features were at least in part Slavic-speaking women who converted to Judaism.
The paper examines the opposition of existential-possessive constructions with le- ‘to’, the inherited strategy in Hebrew for denoting possession, and similar constructions with ecel ‘at’. The latter, induced by several languages in contact with Hebrew throughout its history (Arabic, Yiddish, Russian), began to encroach upon the domain of the former at various stages of the language, including Emerging Modern Hebrew, but ended up being relegated to other functions. The paper surveys the functions of ecel in Modern Hebrew and examines the question of why this contact-induced construction did not become entrenched as the dominant existential-possessive construction.
This paper documents the evolution of existential possessive modals in a literary corpus of Emergent Modern Hebrew (EMH). Modal uses of the existential element yeš are shown to have changed their form and their meaning during this period. Morphosyntactically, the possessive variant declined, and it became impossible to inflect modal yeš. Semantically, a special meaning of ability that was available in the classical Hebrew variants of the construction was lost, and modal yeš turned into an expression that exclusively conveys impersonal deontic necessity. Language contact, primarily with Russian, is suggested to have shaped the morphosyntax of existential possessive modals in EMH, whereas internally-motivated processes based on the inherited semantics may explain the meaning modal yeš ultimately developed. On this view, the grammar of Modern Hebrew exhibits recombination of features from languages in contact at the time of language revival.
This paper traces the way ʕadayin ‘still’ in Modern Hebrew (MH) emerged as a new concessive, developing out of an earlier aspectual adverb which originated in Rabbinic Hebrew, after being borrowed from Aramaic. The account adopted here provides us with the means to describe and analyze the process of ʕadayin’s reanalysis in MH, which is claimed to have been triggered by the use of ʕadayin in adversative sentences opening with ʔaval ‘but’ at the time Hebrew began to be influenced by English. The input of the presupposition of ʔaval ‘but’ is taken into account as the major contribution to the process of reanalysis, along with the original focus-sensitivity and anaphoricity of ʕadayin.
This paper addresses a phenomenon in colloquial Modern Hebrew: the use of the future form of the verb rather than the imperative form to convey a command. In Biblical Hebrew both forms are used to convey commands, but in Modern Hebrew the use of the future form of the verb to express commands is confined to the informal register. The distribution of the forms in Biblical Hebrew and in Modern Hebrew is shown to be dramatically different. This suggests that the phenomenon in Modern Hebrew does not have its roots in Biblical Hebrew. Further historical survey indicates that it is a relatively new development. From this historical survey I conclude that the use of the future to express a command in Modern Hebrew has its roots in Rabbinic Hebrew of the 18th and 19th centuries and that the underlying factors which brought this situation about are a process of what is sometimes called ‘insubordination’ and system simplification.
The paper discusses a change in the typological profile of Hebrew in terms of lexicalization patterns. These patterns concern the way in which the conceptual components of event descriptions of motion or change are distributed across morpho-syntactic categories when they include in addition in addition a specification of manner in the same nuclear clause. V-framed languages require the verb to express the motion or change, and manner, if expressed, must be expressed otherwise. S-framed languages allow the verb to express the manner and the motion or change to be expressed by a satellite such as a prepositional phrase. Biblical Hebrew is shown to have properties of V-framed languages, while Modern Hebrew shows properties of S-framed languages. The article shows that Hebrew first developed a locative/directional distinction, allowing manner verbs of a variety of sorts to appear with directional phrases. More recently, constructions with non-subcategorized objects have begun to appear. The article shows that these constructions developed from reanalyses of Classical Hebrew collocations.
The formation of the colloquial register of Modern Hebrew has been customarily attributed to the effects of speech revival. Based on an extensive textual examination of pre-modern texts, this paper suggests that some of the most conspicuous features of contemporary colloquial usage in fact reflect continuity with pre-existing linguistic habits which were well-rooted among Jewish writers prior to speech revival. These features were naturally transferred to speech by first generation L2 speakers, but due to their incompatibility with the classical models (on which literary language as well as linguistic education were based), they were interpreted by native-born L1 speakers as bearing a colloquial flavor. Recognition of this process sheds new light on the formation processes of Modern Hebrew. Moreover, it may have more general implications for our understanding of the mechanisms of language change, as it indicates that colloquial language does not have to be formed by actual speakers, but can be the result of language development that occurred in periods where the language was only used for writing.
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.
The paper assesses the influence on Modern Hebrew of the two previous spoken stages of Hebrew: Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew in its early, Mishnaic, phase. Contra the received view in the current literature, I argue that Modern Hebrew has in many respects readopted the syntax of Biblical Hebrew, the earlier of the two ancient stages, rather than being a development of the subsequent Rabbinic stage. The paper discusses particular constructions whose Biblical syntax had historically been replaced by Rabbinic syntax, yet were reinstated in Modern Hebrew. These include clausal constructions such as conditional and unconditional clauses, clausal complements of aspectual and modal auxiliaries, and gerundive clauses. The Rabbinic component in the syntax of Modern Hebrew seems to be limited to values and exponents drawn from Rabbinic Hebrew for the functional categories originating in Biblical Hebrew or in languages with which Hebrew was in contact during its history.
The paper argues that contact-induced change is no more unusual or “inorganic” than any sort of language change, and that it does not affect the basic continuity that language transmission across generations ensures. Language continuity depends on an unbroken line of transmission, which may be preserved not only in cases of system-internal changes, but also in changes induced by language contact, even in creoles and mixed languages. The paper illustrates these points by examining three cases of language contact: Judezmo (Judeo-Spanish spoken by Jewish communities in the Balkans before World War II); the Constantinople Judeo-Greek dialect of the 16th century; the diglossia in 19th century Greece between Demotic and Katharevousa.
It is often assumed that creole languages represent ‘exceptional’ language development in which a contact language or a variety largely spoken by late L2 learners nativizes and becomes the main language of a community. It is therefore not uncommon that scholars of contact languages or revitalized languages (e.g., Hebrew) ask whether such languages are creoles or not. The common assumption is that so-called creoles exhibit certain specific linguistic features which distinguish them from other non-creolized languages, and which could be used as a yardstick to evaluate the status of other languages as creoles. But, what if any given language is a creolized form of a pre-existing language spoken by previous generations? In this paper, I argue that language acquisition always happens in a situation of contact comparable to creole contexts, in which learners are faced with heterogeneous inputs and recombine competing linguistic features into new linguistic items. Under this view, all natural languages involve a hybrid grammar. I further discuss how recombination leads to linguistic variation both at the learner’s and population level.
Languages are constantly formed and changed by the opposing forces of variation and conventionalization. Yet it is not clear whether one of the two forces is prior to the other in language emergence, nor do we know how the two interact early in the life of a language. By comparing two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), both about 90 years old, we argue that the initial stages of a language are characterized by great variation. Conventionalization ensues, but it does not proceed in a unified manner in all linguistic domains of a language or in all languages equally; some domains and structures conventionalize before others, and in some languages the drive towards conventionalization is stronger than in others. We provide evidence for the claim that the drive towards conventionalization is the result of various socio-linguistic factors, such as time, the expansion of the community, the expansion of language use to new communicative domains, and the need to signal social identity.
This paper examines the socio-linguistic situation and mechanisms that led to diachronic changes in the syntax of Eastern Yiddish, such as the emergence of embedded Verb-Second. Following Weinreich (1958), Santorini (1989, 1992) and my earlier work (Pereltsvaig 2017), I analyze these changes as resulting from contact with Slavic languages. Furthermore, I argue that contact involved interference through shift and “Pattern replication” (in Matras and Sakel’s 2007 terminology) rather than borrowing or “Matter replication”. In addition, I propose that the “shifters” to Yiddish who introduced Slavic grammatical features were at least in part Slavic-speaking women who converted to Judaism.