Languages of Judaism Hebrew, Aramaic, Ladino, Yiddish, and Yinglish
Dec 24, 2015
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