I have been listening to Rabbi Daniel Lapin talk about his book on Hebrew. He claims Hebrew is unique in that it does change. A person who speaks Hebrew today can understand the prophets from thousands of years ago, but a person who speaks English today would have difficulty understanding Chaucer.
Is it true Hebrew is essentially unchanged? (Some changes are, of course, necessary, like adding a word for telephone.)
Are there other languages that are essentially unchanged from thousands of years ago?
The rabbi also claims Hebrew is a conservative language and that the language itself supports politically-conservative positions. Any truth to that? As an example, the rabbi says there is no word for entitlement in Hebrew.
I have included a link to his book, which Amazon, for some reason, includes in their Christian Living section–nothing says Christian like a rabbi writing about Hebrew.
Linguistic prism in Icelandic is the law. Icelandic does not borrow words from other lanuages, and anyoe who knows Icelandic can read the old Norse legends. Icelandic is considered one of the purest languages used today.
So I’m calling total bullcrap on Hebrew being “the only language that does not change.”
Also, the reason that modern Hebrew is so similar to Biblical Hebrew is that modern Hebrew is—and I mean no disrespect by this, it’s a wonderful language—pretty much a linguistic zombie.
That is, Biblical Hebrew in various variants has been a learned language ever since the Hellenistic period, when it was displaced as a spoken language by Aramaic and other vernaculars. It remained comparatively (though certainly not entirely) unchanged up to the modern period because it was primarily a sacred and liturgical language, and secondarily a medium of scholarship and communication between educated people.
Latin had a somewhat similar linguistic trajectory from a spoken to a learned/liturgical language, and likewise it was conservative in its changes compared to spoken languages. An educated 18th-century Latin scholar could understand texts written by Caesar and Cicero nearly two millennia earlier, for instance.
Modern Hebrew was deliberately constructed and adopted as a spoken vernacular on the model of Biblical Hebrew: it’s a reanimated corpse of a dead language. Or at least it was to begin with: now, of course, it has been spoken from birth by several generations and has established itself as a genuine living language.
But its structure and style cannot be compared to those of modern languages that have naturally evolved as living spoken languages from an ancient ancestor, such as Italian and other modern descendants of Latin.
You know that modern Hebrew is a reconstructed language, right? Like if Catholics were persecuted all over the world, and formed a new country in the middle of nowhere and decided that since the new citizens were from all over the world then everyone should speak Latin and their children learned Latin as a first language.
So yes, Hebrew is similar to ancient Hebrew because it is ancient Hebrew brought back to life. But it sure isn’t “unchanging” because all those words for telephone and internet and automobile and AK-47 and koala and tomato that ancient Hebrews didn’t have add up to a tremendous new vocabulary.
As for the notion that Hebrew itself fosters political conservatism, you do know that Israel was founded by a bunch of socialists right? It might be small-c conservative in the sense that it is a revived ancient language, but Israelis are not conservative in the way American conservatives use the word conservative.
Hebrew has probably changed more in the past century than it had in the previous 2000 years. While its basic grammar has remained essentially unchanged*, its colloquial speech and vocabulary is evolving as fast as English.
Something I suspect it shares with most languages since the invention of the printing press; how much has English grammar changed since 1600?
As others have said–speakers of modern Hebrew can understand ancient texts because the language was dead for so long. Dead languages don’t change. Live ones do. Now that Hebrew is alive again, it does change. That was one ignorant rabbi.
But if we’re throwing around examples of languages in which modern speakers can easily read old texts–Italian speakers can still read the original Dante without any problem. In fact, a person who has taken just a couple years of Italian classes can read Dante without any problem (and with a dictionary). Now* that’s* consistency.
Anyway “entitlement” is a 21st century American right wing conceit that doesn’t have anything to do with Hebrew for crying out loud. I call load o’ crap on that.
Which it basically is. Or rather on the Florentine dialect spoken by Dante of which his writing is perhaps the most famous example. Spoken “Italian” is going to vary all over the map as one wanders around the country.
It’s based on it but not identical. If you’ve studied Official Italian Italian, Dante’s work still has a clear dialectal flavor, but is understandable. To students AND Italian speakers, I’d hope. Otherwise those Italian classes were a waste.
I’m pretty sure that no Italian textbook that is not compatible with Dante will be approved for Italian public schools. Languages aren’t completely organic - there’s also a strong element of imposition from above.
Which doesn’t mean that my example isn’t valid. The modern dialect of Italian taught in schools is close enough to Dante’s old-as-the-hills dialect to be comprehensible. Which was my point, right?
And I don’t know about the Hebrew language, but the Jewish culture certainly has, and has had for a very long time, the concept of entitlement: The Torah calls for means-testing in charging for medical services.
