The Case for Yiddish in Israel (Hillel Halkin)
Philologos vs. Dovid Katz, Round II (Hillel Halkin)
Philologos vs. Dovid Katz, Round III (Hillel Halkin)
Second Opinion: The Israeli Language (Ghil`ad Zuckermann)
Letter to the Editor (Ghil`ad Zuckermann)
The
Forward
3 December 2004
The Case for Yiddish in Israel
by Philologos [= Hillel Halkin]
Dovid Katz, whose newly published "Words On Fire: The Unfinished Story
of Yiddish" was reviewed in the Forward recently, is one-of-a-kind in the
Jewish world - a roving, long-bearded scholar (born in New York, he now, according
to the book's jacket cover, "divides his time between Lithuania and North
Wales") who, one has the impression, would rather spend his time conversing
in Yiddish to the last Jew in a Belorussian shtetl than presiding over a seminar.
I met him once, a decade ago, at the Forward. The Forward's then-editor, Seth
Lipsky, had arranged a debate between us, subsequently published in this paper's
pages, the subject of which was Yiddish and Hebrew - or more precisely, Yiddishism
and Hebraism. I was the Hebraist, Katz the Yiddishist; we argued vigorously,
although not ill-naturedly, about the two languages and their relationship to
such things as Israel, the Diaspora, Zionism, anti-Zionism, the Jewish past
and the Jewish future. And we never ran into each other again.
I mention this because Katz is still arguing. (So, I guess, am I.) He can't forgive Israel one thing. This isn't its policies toward the Palestinians, or its right-wing settlers or the strong presence of religion in its public life - all issues about which, although I have no idea what he thinks, many Yiddishists coming out of the socialist-Bundist tradition have strong opinions. No, what's unforgivable is the fact that Israel is a Hebrew- rather than a Yiddish-speaking state.
Of course, he's not the only one. There were many lovers of Yiddish who would have been enthusiastic Zionists if only Zionism had embraced Yiddish and not Hebrew as its linguistic medium. The Hebraist argument that Hebrew alone spanned 3,000 years of Jewish history and was the language of the entire Jewish people, whereas Yiddish was spoken by only a part of that people for the last thousand years, didn't impress them. Yiddish was the living language of millions of Jews, Hebrew a dead one; why revive a corpse when you already have a warm body?
Katz agrees with this. He takes the anti-Hebrew polemic a step further, however. Basing himself on the controversial conclusions of his own scholarship, he denies the Hebraists even their starting premise. It is not modern Hebrew at all, he claims, that represents 3,000 years of Jewish history but, on the contrary, Yiddish! As he puts it, "Israeli [his denigrating word for modern Hebrew] could not replace Yiddish in a million years because Yiddish is the unique, irreplaceable linguistic heir to the grand Jewish language chain that started when Hebrew arose from Canaanite, was continued when Jewish Aramaic became the main Jewish language, and replicated again when Yiddish appeared." Elsewhere in "Words on Fire," he explains this at greater length:
"The Jews who settled in the Germanic lands of Central Europe and became the first Ashkenazim around a thousand years ago were the creators of Yiddish, which took over from Aramaic the mantle of the major Jewish vernacular.... [Jewish] Settlers in medieval Europe did not start to speak the local German language any more than the Judean exiles in Babylonia in the sixth century B.C. 'started to speak' the Aramaic of their new Babylonian neighbors....the settlers' previous language encountered the new neighbors' vernacular, resulting in a brand-new Jewish language, fused from the (majority) elements of their new neighbors' language with the (minority) elements brought with them from their previous abode. In the case of the genesis of Yiddish, the minority component was a kind of Jewish Aramaic that comprised a substantial Hebrew component. Yiddish resulted when [this Jewish Aramaic] encountered the medieval German urban dialects the Jews now heard every day."
To understand the point that Katz is making, one has to realize that it involves a theory of the origins of Yiddish first proposed by him more than 20 years ago, and radically different from any of the other theories held by contemporary scholars. That is, although there is scholarly disagreement as to what area of German-speaking Europe Yiddish first arose in, and where the Jews who settled in this area came from, it is assumed by everyone except Katz that these Jews came from somewhere else in Europe and spoke a Judaized form of the language of that "somewhere," whether Judeo-French, Judeo-Italian, or Judeo-Slavic. Yiddish began to develop, according to this view, when the speakers of this "Judeo-Something" converted to a dialect of German into which they introduced the distinctively Jewish - i.e., Hebrew and Aramaic - vocabulary of their previous language.
Katz thinks differently. The first Yiddish speakers, he believes, came to German-speaking lands not from elsewhere in Europe, but directly from the Middle East; and the language they brought with them was not some form of Judeo-European, but an Aramaic similar to the language of the Talmud. Yiddish was thus the "first generation" heir of this language, not a more distant descendant.
Katz's linguistic case for this theory will be discussed next week.
The
Forward
December 10, 2004
Philologos vs. Dovid Katz, Round II
by Philologos [=Hillel Halkin]
Last week's column ended with a brief description of linguist Dovid Katz's theory
of the origins of Yiddish. Succinctly restated in Katz's newly published history
of Yiddish "Words on Fire," this theory holds that the first speakers
of Yiddish did not arrive, as is generally assumed, in a German-speaking area
of Europe from elsewhere on the European continent, but rather directly from
the Middle East. The language that these immigrants brought with them and from
which they switched to German, Katz believes, was Aramaic, the Semitic sister
of Hebrew spoken by Palestinian and Middle Eastern Jewry until it was gradually
replaced, following the Muslim conquest of the region in seventh century C.E.,
by Arabic. Judeo-Aramaic, the language of the Talmud and other early rabbinic
literature, had in it an enormous amount of Hebrew, which, Katz claims, immediately
became part of the new Judeo-German speech that eventually came to be known
as Yiddish.
We spoke last week of why, ideologically, a Yiddishist like Katz finds such a theory appealing. But Katz is also a linguist, and a good one. What linguistic evidence does he have for his beliefs? For this, one has to turn to his more technical papers, such as "The Proto-Dialectology of Ashkenaz" or "Hebrew, Aramaic and the Rise of Yiddish," in which he marshals several lexical and phonetic arguments on his behalf.
The lexical case starts with the fact that Yiddish has a much higher percentage of Hebrew and Aramaic words in its active vocabulary - well more than 10 % - than does any other known Jewish language of Europe, such as Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, Judeo-French, various dialects of Judeo-Italian and so on. How can we explain this if the original speakers of Yiddish came from elsewhere in Europe and switched to Judeo-German from one of these languages? From where did all of Yiddish's Semitic vocabulary come?
The standard answer to this question is that this vocabulary came from an intensive familiarity with biblical and rabbinic literature. Ashkenazic, Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities, it is maintained, were better educated than Jews elsewhere and had more comprehensive institutions of Jewish learning. Therefore they incorporated more words from classical Jewish texts into their speech. The "text theory" of the pronounced Hebrew component in Yiddish was developed elaborately by the greatest of modern Yiddish linguists, Max Weinreich, and accepted by nearly all his disciples.
However, the "text theory" has its problems. To begin with, it is not at all clear that other Jewish communities in Europe were inferior to Ashkenazic Jewry in learning; in the period in which Yiddish first developed, the Jews of Spain, southern France and Italy had a high level of Jewish education, too. Moreover, as Katz observes, many Hebrew words in Yiddish are everyday adverbs and prepositions (such as kimat, "almost"; beshas, "during"; makhmes, "because of"; etc.) that are unlikely to be borrowed from sacred texts and don't have parallels in other Jewish languages. And in addition, there is an almost invariable law in Yiddish that when two or more Hebrew synonyms are found in biblical and rabbinic literature, Yiddish chooses the chronologically latest of them. (For instance, the Yiddish word for "holiday," yontif, comes from rabbinic yom tov rather than biblical hag or mo'ed.) This might indicate that Yiddish did not take such words from sacred texts but instead inherited them from a chain of transmitted speech.
Katz's phonetic evidence is varied, too. To take one interesting case, he points out that there is a "systematic correspondence" between the articulation of vowels in German and Hebrew words in all dialects of Yiddish. Thus, for example, just as German hund, "dog," is hunt in the Yiddish of Lithuania and hint in the Yiddish of Poland, so Hebrew guzmah, "exaggeration," is guzme in Lithuania and gizme in Poland, and so on all the way down the line.
The logical conclusion from this, Katz argues, is that Yiddish's Hebrew vocabulary entered it together with its German vocabulary "on touchdown," that is, with the first generation of Yiddish speakers, thus ensuring that German-derived and Hebrew-derived words underwent the same vowel shifts as Yiddish spread to different areas and diversified. This is not what might have been expected to happen had Hebrew words been absorbed slowly by Yiddish from sacred texts throughout the centuries. Since Polish Yiddish, for example, has its own "u" vowel (as in khusn, "bridegroom," in contrast to Lithuanian khosn), Hebrew guzmah, had it been borrowed from a text at a later time, after the vowel shift from hunt to hint had taken place, would have been guzme in Poland, too.
Katz's arguments are good ones, and not to be lightly dismissed. The problem with them is not so much linguistic as historical. Assuming even, that is, that the linguistic evidence could be best accounted for by a hypothesized group of Middle Eastern, Aramaic-speaking Jewish immigrants to a Germanophonic area of Europe somewhere around the year 1000, which is the earliest date for the origins of Yiddish supposed by anyone, is there any reason to believe that such an immigration actually did or could have taken place?
Stay tuned. We'll deal with this question next week.
The
Forward
December 17, 2004
Philologos vs. Dovid Katz, Round III
by Philologos [= Hillel Halkin]
In this third and last column on linguist Dovid Katz's theory of the origins of Yiddish, let us pose the question: Is there any historical evidence for a migration around the year 1000 C.E. or later of a community of Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East to a German-speaking area of Europe - a migration that, according to Katz, produced Yiddish's "big bang" by fusing, in a single generation, Germanic and Semitic elements into an instantaneously created new language? And if no such evidence exists, is it plausible to assume that this might have happened anyway?
Unfortunately for Katz's theory, the answer to both these questions is a resounding no. Not only does Jewish history know nothing of such a migration, but it also is almost inconceivable that one could have taken place.
To begin with, by the year 1000 - and no one dates the origins of Yiddish back any earlier - the number of Aramaic-speaking Jews in the Middle East had dwindled greatly, particularly in the urban centers in which Jews were concentrated. Although it is impossible to gauge the exact rate at which, after the seventh-century Islamic conquest of the region, Arabic replaced Aramaic as the spoken language of its Jews, the written evidence tells us that this happened rapidly. After the final redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, which was coeval with the ascendancy of Islam, not a single Aramaic Jewish text of importance was produced in the Middle East. Strictly religious literature, such as exegetical commentaries and liturgical poetry, were written in pure Hebrew. Jewish philosophy, on the other hand, a new genre that developed under Muslim influence, was composed entirely in Arabic, the earliest extant example being the works of the great rabbinical figure Saadya Gaon (892-942), who was born in Egypt and lived most of his life in Iraq.
Even more to the point than Gaon's philosophical work, which was written for Jewish intellectuals, was his Arabic translation of the Bible, which was done for ordinary Jews. These were Jews who, if they could not read the Bible in the original Hebrew, had read it in Aramaic until Islamic times. Gaon's translation demonstrates that by the early 10th century, Aramaic no longer was a language widely understood by them.
Of course, Aramaic still might have survived among some Middle Eastern Jews, particularly in rural and outlying areas. But such rural Jews would have been far less likely to travel than their urban, commercially active counterparts, let alone to move en masse to Europe - and in any case, there was absolutely no incentive in this period for any Middle-Eastern Jews to settle in Europe. The Muslim Middle East was, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, a far more prosperous and economically developed region than Christian Europe, and one in which Jews were treated much better - even before the terrible massacres of German-speaking Jews in the Rhineland in 1092. An estimated 90% of the world's Jews lived in the Muslim world at this time, and there was no reason for them to leave it for the literally and figuratively colder climate of Christendom.
Moreover, let us assume that - improbable as it would have been and in the absence of any historical documentation - groups of Aramaic-speaking, Middle-Eastern Jews did, sometime in the 11th or 12th century, immigrate en masse to Europe and settle down there. How and why would they have gotten, in one jump, to Central Europe, where German was spoken? This was a period during which land travel between Europe and the Middle East was practically nonexistent, the only routes being the shipping lanes across the Mediterranean - and these would have brought our emigrants to the port cities of France and Italy, not to the interior of the continent. The idea that they would have gone straight to Worms or Regensburg (which Katz and other linguists have pointed to, on the basis of its medieval German dialect, as Yiddish's most probable place or origin) is like the idea of 19th-century Russian Jewish emigrants en route to America going straight to Cleveland or Cincinnati without first settling in New York and Boston.
The whole thing just doesn't hold water. It is not a historical construct but an ideological one, the true rationale for which is its constructor's desire to view Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, as the main conduit of linguistic and cultural continuity in Jewish history. Still fighting the great war that raged between the two languages in the first half of the 20th century, Dovid Katz has sought to refute the in fact irrefutable claim that Hebrew alone is the Jewish language of all times and places by arguing on linguistic grounds that, on the contrary, it was Yiddish that transmitted the ancient Jewish culture of the Middle East to its new home in Europe.
The great language war, however, is long over, and diehards like Katz who go on fighting it are risking making anachronisms out of themselves. Katz is a brilliant linguist who has contributed many things to contemporary Yiddish studies. A logical analysis of Yiddish's historical origins is not one of them.
Mendele
December 28. 2004
SECOND OPINION: THE ISRAELI LANGUAGE
Ghil`ad Zuckermann
http://www.zuckermann.org
gz208@cam.ac.uk
Date: 29 December 2004
Dear Yiddish scholars,
The Genesis of the Israeli Language: A Brief Response to "Philologos"’s "Hebrew vs. Israeli" (Forward, 24 December 2004)
In his/her column "Hebrew vs. Israeli" (24 December 2004), "Philologos"
took issue with my letter explaining why the term "Israeli" is not
"denigrating", but a positive description of a beautiful, complex
language with hybrid vigor. Jumping to conclusions, "Philologos" makes
outrageous remarks about my historical linguistic theory of the genesis of Israeli
as being "driven by the agenda of post- (if not anti-) Zionism". S/he
might be pleased to learn that I have also received angry responses from Israeli
Arabs claiming that the term " Israeli" is Zionist propaganda (because
they are both Israeli citizens and native Arabic-speakers).
Faced with an uncongenial opinion, it is all too easy to categorize one's opponent as Zionist, post-Zionist, communist, fascist etc. In this respect, "Philologos" is not alone. A Jerusalem academic has accused me of being a "self-hating JEW". When I asked him how he had arrived at such a strange conclusion, he said that Yiddish is a diasporic "zhargon" and urged me (in fact, warned me!) to stop mentioning it in the same breath as Hebrew!
Unfortunately, the abusive and often groundless ad hominem logical fallacy is much used. I have no agenda whatsoever other than to uncover historical linguistic facts. This is what a professional historical descriptive linguist is supposed to do.
Here are some of the historical and linguistic flaws from which "Philologos"'s response suffers: (1) The confusion between mother tongue and literary language; (2) The mutual intelligibility myth; (3) The irrelevance of mutual intelligibility to linguistic genesis; (4) The confusion between evolution and genesis, and the internal development myth.
(1) The Confusion Between "Mother Tongue" and "Literary Language"
"Philologos" insightfully admits that Israeli "is a very different
language from the many varieties of Hebrew spoken and written in the past, and
of course, too, many of its syntactical and grammatical features are no longer
Semitic". However, s/he then adds the following:
"Yet why this makes it less 'Hebrew' than, say, the heavily Yiddishized
Hebrew of Hasidic literature in Eastern Europe, or the heavily Arabized Hebrew
of the Jewish 'Golden Age' in Muslim Spain, is beyond me. Or would Mr. Zuckerman[n]
suggest that we begin
referring to the Hebrew of Nachman of Braslav as 'Hasidic', to the Hebrew of
Shmuel Hanagid and Abraham Ibn Ezra as 'Andalusic', and so on, treating each
as a different language?"
The comparison of a living mother tongue (Israeli) to four literary forms of Hebrew which have no native speakers is problematic. It is hard to find a linguist these days who would deny that there is a crucial difference between the acquisition of a mother tongue and that of a second language. Regardless of the damage it might have caused, directly or indirectly, to the study of cultural linguistics and language contact, generative linguistics has usefully demonstrated that the linguistic faculty is innate. In other words, we are born with a linguistic module in our brain responsible for the acquisition of our first language(s). No matter how intelligent we are, we acquire our mother tongue(s) perfectly and do not make grammatical mistakes.
The refusal to acknowledge that Hebrew was not spoken as a mother tongue between the second and nineteenth centuries CE grossly distorts our understanding of the genetic nature of Israeli. The evolution, and certainly the genetics, of a spoken first language (such as Israeli) are not parallel to the evolution of a literary or liturgical language (see 4 below).
From the above-mentioned paragraph, "Philologos" accuses my hybridizational
theory, according to which Israeli is both Semitic and Indo-European, of "greatly
underestimating the continuity between it [Israeli] and the various kinds of
Hebrew that have
preceded it." The fact is, however, that my view clearly acknowledges Hebrew
as a *primary contributor* to Israeli. I do believe that the ideology of language
revival (and I do not think there is anybody - not even "Philologos"
- who would deny the important ideological component in the emergence of Israeli;
i.e., there is no ad hominem here) did (partially) work. Israeli is (partially)
the result of Hebrew revival.
But the advantage of my balanced, non-mono-parental theory is that it also recognizes another very important continuity, totally overlooked by "Philologos": the continuity between Israeli and the mother tongue(s) of the founder generation (i.e., the revivalists and their followers, who were mostly native Yiddish-speakers). Thus, it looks as if the position which underestimates continuity here is not my hybridizational theory at all, but rather that which blindly believes in Hebrew revival *only*. "Philologos" wrongly accuses me of ignoring continuity (of Hebrew) whereas it is her/his position which - without any historical explanation - ignores continuity (of Yiddish...).
The ultimate question, one which "Philologos" ignores, is whether it is possible to bring an unspoken language back to life **without the occurrence of cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongue(s)**.
(2) The Mutual Intelligibility Myth
"Philologos" writes the following:
"Although no Israeli I know of thinks he is speaking the eighth-century BCE "language of Isaiah," a large amount of this language is still easily understandable to every Israeli. Indeed, if we take the book of Isaiah's opening verse, "The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Yotam, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah," there is not one word here that even the most uneducated speaker of modern Hebrew would not comprehend immediately. This holds true for many passages in the Bible."
However, despite eleven years of studying the Old Testament at school, Israelis
depend on the extensive use of glosses (e.g. of Hartom-Cassuto). Moreover, many
Israelis believe that they understand the Old Testament as it is, whereas they
actually "understand" it from
the point of view of Israeli, not of Hebrew!
I am in warm Israel and decided to informally check whether "Philologos" is right about Isaiah. I have invited seven non-linguists, native Israeli-speakers, who know nothing about my linguistic theories. One served with me in the IDF in 1989-93 and we had not seen each other since; he also brought several people I had never met. Their ages vary between 18 and 59. They all studied the Bible at various secular primary and secondary Israeli schools for eleven years. I showed them the beautiful First Chapter of Isaiah (which is easier than many other books in the Bible).
They faced difficulties not only with lexis, but, much more importantly, with
structures, constituent order, aspects/moods/tenses, etc. The following are
some of the items they found hard to understand. (Please forgive my Israeli
transcription of the Hebrew. If one heard the Book of Isaiah using Isaiah's
own phonetics and phonology, one would in any event have understood much less):
-evus?: only one person knows the meaning; -hoy goy khote: several
understand goy as "non-Jew" -keved avon?; -nazoru akhor?; -lo zoru?;
-(kimluna) bemiksha?; -olot (eilim); -meriim?; -atudim?; -khodesh veshabat kro
mikra?; -lo ukhal aven vaatsara?; -ashru khamots?; -rivu (almana)?: they understand
almana but not rivu; -eykha hayta lezona
kirya neemana?: they understand zona as prostitute, find the syntax confusing,
some do not understand eykha, and one wonders, jocularly I hope, which kirya
is referred to here (Kiryat Motzkin?); -(kaspekh haya) lesigim, sav'ekh (mahul
mayim)?; -kabor sigayikh?; -veshaveha (bitsdaka)?; -vetakhperu mehaganot asher
bekhartem?; -ki tihyu keela novelet aleha, ukhegana asher mayim en la?; -vehaya
hekhason lin`oret, ufo`alo lenitsots?...
All the seven informants showed signs of frustration, and one of them, who is 33 years old, suggested that we should translate the Bible into our own language (i.e., Israeli [my term]). He claimed to know many people who failed tanakh exams which allegedly test understanding of Biblical processes, not because they were stupid or lacked historical perspicacity, but because they did not comprehend the language. An 18 year-old informant then mentioned that he had failed an exam about the literature of the Nobel Laureate Sh. Y. Agnon (who often tried to write in Mishnaic Hebrew) because he could not understand Agnon's language.
I decided to take the opportunity of such "pgishat makhzor (or rather tanakh)" to check whether they understood the following notorious Biblical noun-phrases or sentences. Most of them thought they did, although the meaning they indicated was actually not the Biblical meaning but the distinct Israeli "faux ami" meaning:
-bau banim ad *mashber* (Isaiah): crisis?; -yeled shaashuim (Jeremiah): playboy? :-) ; -kol haanashim hayodim ki *mekatrot* neshehem leelohim akherim (Jeremiah): complaining? :-) ; -vayehi hashemesh baa (Genesis): sunrise?; -napila goralot veneda (Jonah): they thought it was rhetorical future (rather than cohortative); -avanim shakhakumayim (Job): syntactically, it was against their grammar that the stones eroded the water, although in this case they managed semantically.
At that stage, one of the women present said that as a primary school pupil
she was told by her teacher that the Bible was written in the same language
that she spoke ("Hebrew"), and that made her feel silly as she could
not make head or tail of it (she used the Israeli expression "lo hevanti
ma rotsim mehakhaim sheli, ma ze leazazel "altsvi israel al bamotekha khalal"?"
- cf. 2 Samuel 1: 19, the beginning of David's Eulogy for Jonathan, which many
Israelis are
required to learn by heart).
I tried to console her by suggesting that she did understand better the meaning of "ekh naflu giborim", which brings me to the next point, which is, in fact, much more important from the perspective of linguistic genetics.
(3) The Irrelevance of Mutual Intelligibility to Linguistic Genetics
I have briefly demonstrated Israelis' misunderstanding of the Old Testament. However, even if Israelis can understand some Hebrew, that does not automatically mean that Israeli is a direct continuation of Hebrew only. In fact, mutual intelligibility is not so crucial in determining the genetic affiliation of a language.
After all, it is "Philologos" who mentions "the circa eighth-century C.E. "Beowulf," which, although it is written in what is known as Old English, does not have a single line of which the contemporary speaker of English can make sense." Indeed, speakers of Modern English cannot understand even Geoffrey Chaucer, who is much more recent (c. 1343-1400). **However, no one would claim that his/her language is not genetically related to contemporary English!**
By contrast, a Spanish-speaker might understand Media Lengua (a mixed language spoken in Ecuador), which consists of Quechua grammar but whose lexis is 93% Spanish. Who would argue that Media Lengua is genetically Spanish (only)?
Ben-Yehuda might have liked to have cancelled the heritage of the Diaspora and "Diasporism", and taught Israelis to speak Biblical Hebrew. **Had he been successful**, they would *indeed* have spoken a language closer to ancient Hebrew than Modern English is to Chaucer, because they would have bypassed more than 2000 years of natural development.
On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that Hebrew never died as a spoken language in the second century CE. It continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews. They eventually returned to the Land of Israel, continuing to speak Hebrew. It might well be the case that mutual intelligibility-wise, that Hebrew would have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does our lovely Israeli. But this is irrelevant to the issue of the origins of Israeli!
(4) The Confusion Between Evolution and Genesis; the Internal Development
Myth
"Philologos" continues:
"Even Shakespeare, writing a mere 400 years ago in what is already known
as "modern English," is more difficult for the average American than
the Hebrew books of Genesis or Samuel are for the average Israeli. Therefore,
would Mr. Zuckerman[n] suggest that we stop
referring to the language he has addressed me in as "English" and
call it something else - 'Neo-Anglo-French', perhaps?"
Indeed, too many Israelis have been indoctrinated to believe that their language is different from Biblical Hebrew in the same way as the English of the American novelist John Grisham (b. 1955) is different from that of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), let alone the above-mentioned Chaucer. Others might refer you to the Greek spoken in today's Athens, which is obviously very different from that of the playwright Aristophanes (c. 448-380 BCE) or the historian Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) or the language of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
However, such analogies are flawed. Between Chaucer and Grisham, as well as
between Ancient and Modern Greek, there has always been a continuous chain of
native-speakers. For generation after generation, the language was transmitted
as a mother tongue. **All languages
change over time**, but **the fact that Hebrew went unspoken for 1700 years
sets it apart.** This circumstance we can neither remedy nor ignore. Although
it still developed as a literary and liturgical language, its evolution cannot
be compared to that of a spoken language.
"Philologos" says:
"Mr. Zuckerman[n] is missing the linguistic point in more ways than one. The rule of thumb is that we call modern languages by names different from those of their ancestors when two or more of them have the same ancestor and need to be differentiated; this is why we don't call both Italian and French "modern Latin," or both Hindi and Bengali "modern Sanskrit. When the ancestor has had only one offspring, on the other hand, as is the case with Greek or Japanese, we call the modern language by the same name as the ancient one, no matter how different it is. Hebrew falls into the latter category, and only someone with an ideological ax [tries? -- ed.] to make an exception of it."
"Philologos" believes *axiomatically* that Israeli is a pure continuation of Hebrew, totally overlooking the historical fact that Hebrew was not a mother tongue for more than 1700 years. S/he is not aware of the very basic linguistic difference between evolution (of a pre-existent mother tongue) and genesis (of a new language). His/her confusion between linguistic typology and linguistic genetics results in the "internal development myth". Inter alia, because of a lack of distinction between Hebrew linguistics and Israeli linguistics, this myth argues that every linguistic feature in Israeli is the result of an internal development within Hebrew.
However, the formation of Israeli was not the result of language contact between Hebrew and a powerful superstratum, such as English in the case of Arabic, Kurdish in the case of Neo-Aramaic, or French in the case of English. Rather, *ab initio*, Israeli, which is only 100 years old, had two primary contributors: Yiddish and Hebrew (and many other secondary contributors). The unique case of Israeli is, therefore, not parallel to Greek or Japanese.
A Final Remark on Terminology
Finally, it is of great importance to keep in mind that this dispute is not just about terminology. It also has "meat", adding substance to our knowledge of history and language. If you are convinced that Israeli is a hybrid language but dislike the name "Israeli", I would still regard my efforts as successful. Several months ago, I went to a Tel Aviv cafe for a meal. Seeing Greek salad on the menu, I decided to play a small trick on the waitress. "Excuse me, but why is it called "Greek" salad?" (slikha, lama korim leze salad yean?), I inquired. Clearly in a hurry, and impatient with such obvious questions, she answered nonchalantly, and a little arrogantly: "Can't you see that it has Bulgarian cheese in it?!" (ma z'tomeret, ata lo roe sheyesh beze gvina bulgarit?!).
It took her four seconds to realize the beautiful paradox in her explanation. Words can often bear a paradoxical relationship to their meaning. Yet (despite these obvious sense-reference, de re - de dicto contradictions), people rarely think twice about how appropriate the signifier they are using really is.
Yours respectfully,
Ghil`ad Zuckermann
Dr. Ghil`ad Zuckermann is the author of "Language Contact and
Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and "Hebrew
as Myth" (Am Oved, 2005). His further publications are listed in http://www.zuckermann.org/.
He can be contacted at gz208@cam.ac.uk.
Letter to the Editor
The Forward
5 February 2005
In 'Hebrew vs. Israeli' (24 December 2004), "Philologos" criticizes
my glottonym "Israeli" as a "denigrating word for modern Hebrew".
But I would argue that "Israeli" is not at all derogatory. It simply
acknowledges that the marvelously complex language spoken by Israelis is very
different from the Hebrew of the past. Israeli, the world's youngest language,
is mosaic (rather than Mosaic), and it bristles with hybrid vigor.
"Philologos" has deduced that my theory of the genesis of Israeli is "driven by the agenda of post- (if not anti-) Zionism". Some Israeli Arabs have attacked my term "Israeli" as Zionist propaganda (because they are both Israeli citizens and native Arabic-speakers). I have no political agenda. I am a professional descriptive linguist.
"Philologos" claims that I underestimate the degree of continuity between classical Hebrew and the language spoken in Israel today. But I do, in fact, acknowledge that Israeli is partially the result of Hebrew revival. The difference between us is that I also recognize another important continuity: that between Israeli and the mother tongue(s) of the founder generation of revivalists (mainly Yiddish).
"Philologos" also exaggerates the extent of mutual intelligibility between Hebrew and Israeli. Despite eleven years of schooling in the Old Testament, most Israelis still need glosses to understand it. They face difficulties not only with vocabulary, but, more importantly, with structures, word order, tenses, aspects etc.
Much more importantly: even if Israelis understand some Hebrew, that does not mean that Israeli is a direct continuation of Hebrew only. Mutual intelligibility is not crucial in determining the genetic affiliation of a language. After all, few speakers of Modern English understand Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), but no one would claim that his language is genetically unrelated to contemporary English. By contrast, a Spanish-speaker might understand Media Lengua (a mixed language spoken in Ecuador), which consists of Quechua grammar but whose vocabulary is 93% Spanish. Who would argue that Media Lengua is genetically (only) Spanish?
Let us assume for a moment that Hebrew did not die as a spoken language by the second century CE. It continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews who eventually returned to the Land of Israel. From the point of view of mutual intelligibility, their Hebrew could have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does our lovely Israeli. But this is irrelevant to the issue of the origins of Israeli.
The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied linguists since the language emerged 100 years ago. As a consequence, Israeli affords insights into the politics not only of language, but also of linguistics. I maintain that the language spoken in Israel today is a hybrid language. Whatever we choose to call it, we should acknowledge, and celebrate, its complexity.
Dr. Ghil`ad Zuckermann is the author of "Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and "Hebrew as Myth" (Am Oved, 2005). His further publications are listed in http://www.zuckermann.org/. He can be contacted at gz208@cam.ac.uk.