Big reason for that is that, in a simplified manner, since the second exile from Israel until the late 1800s, people spoke Hebrew mostly in relation with the bible. Jews living in, say, Eastern Europe would speak the tongue of the land to others, Yiddish among themselves, and Hebrew only with relation to bible studies. This meant that Hebrew wasn’t evolving at the same rate as other languages. You can see the difference between a living language and a religious one when you look at Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. English is very, very different from the root tongues that formed it. Yiddish didn’t involve quite as much ethnic mixing as English did, but it’s still different from both Hebrew and German. The Hebrew that was first “revived” as a spoken tongue by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the 19th century when Zionism started taking off has rapidly evolved, so that 1948 Hebrew seems almost archaic, somewhere in between today’s vernacular and the Biblical dialect.
The biggest difference is punctuation. Biblical Hebrew, for example, doesn’t use periods.
When children first learn to read they learn what’s called “niqqud” (no idea what the English word is). These are dots or other symbols that tell you how to pronounce a word, and they pretty much replace vowels. By 2nd or 3rd grade, you start dropping these symbols. They aren’t totally gone from adult life–you still see them in poetry (since sometimes words are pronounced differently to create rhymes) or in names. Foreign names or names in fantasy literature usually require niqqud. But it’s almost never used; I can read it, but I don’t remember the names of all the symbols, and writing with it is a major pain. I understand once you have children who learn niqqud, it comes back, though.
Do modern, Hebrew-speaking Israelis refer to the Mediterranean Sea as “the Great Sea,” or some other combination of sounds that more or less means “sea in the middle of the Earth”?
In an earlier time, Popeye would have been challenged to produce a miracle when he made this assertion, and probably would have been roughly handled when he couldn’t. And I’m not talking about making smoke come out of the guns on his battleship tattoo.
Modern Hebrew skips periods. It has been called a language pregnant with meaning.
Niqqud are called “points” in the phrase “pointed text,” or “diacritical marks,” but that’s only an academic term. Most English-speakers don’t have an agreed-on word. Probably if pressed for an answer, we’d call them “all them little dots.”
We don’t have any word for the dot over the “i” in English, and since there’s no content to it, we don’t need one. You never make a lower-case “i” without the dot for a different meaning or pronunciation.
Similarly we typically call the french cedilla the “squiggle under the C” or something, among 90% of English-speakers.
As it happens Turkish does this. There is upper and lower case with as well as upper and lower case without a dot. With a dot, as in “POLİS”, it’s long (same pronunciation as in English, I assume) and without it’s short (don’t know any Turkish, so I can’t think of an example).