percent of earth that is jewish/ Hebrew speakers.

Factual Questions
21

In the area of politics, there are many reasons. But in the area of language, I’m unaware about Hebrew “geting so much play”.

In tis case, if the cards are translated in Hebrew, we can safely assume that it’s for business reasons. Israel being a wealthy country, I suppose it’s a good enough reason to sell the stuff there hence translate it in the local language. Why not in Chinese? Probably because the cards wouldn’t sell there. Why not in Portuguese? Maybe because they didn’t try to penetrate the Brazilian market, or maybe cards intended for Portuguese customers are printed elsewhere, say, in Europe, with a tranlation in Danish, Italian, etc…on them.

It’s not a factual answer, of course, but I’m certain they aren’t printing an Hebraic translation just for the sake of promoting this language.

22

Three WAGs -

  1. Hebrew is pretty simple as far as reading is concerned. Each letter (and vowel symbol) has a unique sound. The letters are different from each other (with few exceptions). The letters are separate - not connected. Most of the sounds are familiar to english speakers. I am not saying that Hebrew is unique in this aspect.

  2. On the webpage they mentioned something about classical languages. Hebrew was one of the three languages (Latin and Greek being the other two) taught in universities of the XVIII and XIX centuries. I don’t know why they left out Latin and Greek. Perhaps they think the kids are ready for the OT but not Aenid or the Illiad.

  3. This is a stereotype - so take I’ll take it at my own risk - but education is important in Jewish households (not that it isn’t in other ethnic groups - but without doing any research (and leaving that to GD) I have the impression that there is a higher percentage of jewish college grads then in the general population). Including Hebrew may be a good marketing tool that would attract a small group that has money to spend on educational items while not alienating other groups.

23

That’s not really true. Actually, many of the Chinese languages are not written at all, and people write in Chinese but essentially must translate to and from Mandarin to do so when they wish to read and write. Other languages have significant amounts of vocabulary with no representation in characters, even if written varieties exist, and some languages have characters that are not used in writing the other languages. In many cases, different languages use different words - descending from different etymologies - for one meaning, and those different words are often written with different characters (though in some cases I imagine both words exist with different meanings in both languages.)

For instance, Cantonese uses hai6 (if memory serves) for “be, is” while Mandarin uses shì. There are different characters for the two words. In formal Cantonese, the character for shì is generally used, but in many contexts, particularly in Hong Kong, they use the native Cantonese word to write it. Either way, it’s read with the Cantonese word.

The extent to which different Chinese languages share a common writing system is limited and it’s a complex matter. Of course, it’s not all that relevant as there are many times as many Mandarin speakers as there are of any of the other Chinese languages; it’s common everywhere in China nowadays, and most educated people are at least proficient in it. It also serves a major purpose as a lingua franca amongst those who don’t share a native language.