I’ve heard that the Hebrew spoken in Israel today is a modern version that was actually invented by the Israeli government. How similar is this to the ancient Hebrew of the Torah? Is it like ancient Greek vs. modern Greek?
I’m not fluent in Hebrew (I do know a fair amount), but I can tell you that that definitely isn’t true. The difference between Modern and Ancient Hebrew is similar to the difference between Old English and Modern English. If you look at Anglo-Saxon, which was in use over 1000 years ago, it’s easy to understand that Ancient Hebrew has evolved quite a bit in 2000+ years.
Maybe the Israeli government standardized it, since regional differences could cause some trouble. I don’t think “invented” is a good word at all for it.
Think about it- Jews/Hebrews in the Middle East, Russia, Spain, Germany, etc. have always been speaking Hebrew. That gave rise to Yiddish, Ladino and similar amalgamations of Hebrew. Obviously the Israelis aren’t going to make up a new language if they’ve been speaking it all along.
It wasn’t invented by the Israeli government, but rather, by one of the earliest Zionists, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. And he didn’t exactly invent it. He took Biblical Hebrew and essentially streamlined/modernized the grammatical rules, and added words (generally compound phrases) for concepts that had not yet found expression in Hebrew. Probably the most imprtant thing he did was write a translation dictionary for the Hebrew langage, which made it easier for the Zionists to start putting it into everyday use (as opposed to only being used for prayer and Torah study).
It’s really almost the same as Biblical Hebrew. Any Yeshiva student can make himself understood in Israel (albeit with laughably bad grammar) without having taken any formal language training in conversational modern Hebrew.
Except, they haven’t. Yiddish is a dialect of German, with some Slavic and Hebrew words. Ladino is a dialect of Spanish, with some Arabic and Hebrew words, and all the other “Jewish languages” (Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Arabic, Bukharic, Dzhidi, etc) are dialects of the majority languages in the countries in which they were spoken, written in Hebrew script.
Hebrew was pretty much extinct as a conversational language (although not in prayer and for religious purposes), until it was recreated about 100 years ago as Modern Hebrew by the Zionist movement.
From my studies in Hebrew (modern). I could be wrong on the details, it has been about a decade…
One of the major things Ben-Yehuda did was modernize the verb tenses and standardize verb conjugation. There was no proper present or past tense in Biblical Hebrew. In Biblical Hebrew, if one wanted to say “God said to Moses” it kinds of comes out “And God will be saying to Moses.” Ben-Yehuda invented/completed/filled in the blanks and fleshed out the verb conjugations. He fleshed out the conjugation system in Hebrew and made it quite coherent. Each verb is based on a three (sometimes four) letter root. That can be conjugated in seven (IIRC) basic formations – three active, three passive, and one reflexive (of the three active, one can be thought of as “pure”, one as causative and one as intensive). Each formation imparts slightly different but often related meanings to the three letter root (not all verbs have meanings in all models). So the root “to write” becomes “to correspond” in another formation. The dictionary offers the following meanings for the root q, tz, r – to reap, to be reaped, to shorten or abridge, to be shortened or abridged, to make shorten, to be shortened. Each formation contains past, present, and future (for I, he, she, you (m singular), you (f singular), we, they (m and f), and you (m and f plural)), imperative (again with the m and f, singular and plural), and infinitive. There are also gerund and other noun-making forms, which makes the language nice and easy to expand. For instance, the word for computer is based on the root for “to think.”
The nice thing is that even irregularly conjugated verbs are conjugated to a formula which is pretty easy to learn (they are termed “weak” verbs). So they are made regular and all like irregulars and conjugated similarly without exception that I’m aware. Perhaps the Israelis can stop by and correct me.