Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 9, 2023

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hebrew is a Semitic language. It was first spoken in Israel. Many Jewish people also speak Hebrew, as Hebrew is part of Judaism.

It was spoken by Israelites a long time ago, during the time of the Bible. After Judah was conquered by Babylonia, the Jews were taken captive (prisoner) to Babylon and started speaking Aramaic. Hebrew was no longer used much in daily life, but it was still known by Jews who studied halakha.

In the 20th century, many Jews decided to make Hebrew into a spoken language again. It became the language of the new country of Israel in 1948. People in Israel came from many places and decided to learn Hebrew, the language of their common ancestors, so that they could all speak one language. However, Modern Hebrew is quite different from Biblical Hebrew, with a simpler grammar and many loanwords from other languages, especially English.

As of 2021, Hebrew has been the only dead language that had been made into a living language again.[3]

The Hebrew Bible was originally written in Biblical Hebrew.

Hebrew is a Semitic language, like Arabic, a similar language. Hebrew words are made by combining a root with a pattern. In Israeli Hebrew, some words are translated from European languages like English, French, German, and Russian. Many words from the Old Testament were given new meanings in Israeli Hebrew.[4] People learning Hebrew need to study the grammar first so that they can read correctly without vowels.

In Israeli Hebrew, there is no verb "to be" in the present tense only in the future and the past tenses. In Biblical Hebrew, there are no tenses but only two aspects: imperfect and perfect. The imperfect is something like the future and the present tenses. The perfect is something like the past tense.

Mishnaic Hebrew was spoken as well as Judeo-Aramaic at the time of Jesus and at the time of the Bar-Kokhba revolt (2nd century AD) until the Byzantine Empire of Justinian (6th century AD).

The Hebrew alphabet has been adapted to write Yiddish, another Jewish language. However, Yiddish is different from Hebrew because Yiddish comes from a mix of German, Hebrew, and other languages.

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters.[5] Five of them change when they are at the end of a word. Hebrew is read and written from right to left.[6] The first three letters, aleph, beth and gimel, are also used in mathematics in the context of transfinite numbers.[7]

The Hebrew alphabet is an abjad and so only the consonants are written, and readers must supply the vowels. Since that can be difficult, the vowels can be marked as dots called nikkud or tnuah (plural nikkud signs and tnuot respectively.) In Modern Hebrew, some letters can denote vowels, which are called matres lectionis (mothers of the reading) since they greatly help reading. Vav (or Waw) can make the 'oo' sound (/u/ in IPA) like in food. Yodh (or Yud) can make the 'ee' sound (/i/ in IPA) like in feed.

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Hebrew language - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Category: Hebrew
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