11 Facts About Modern Hebrew

Term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic" as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew.

Jewish contemporary sources describe Modern Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during about 1200 to 586 BCE.

Scholars debate the degree to which Modern Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region.

Ben-Yehuda codified and planned Modern Hebrew using 8, 000 words from the Bible and 20, 000 words from rabbinical commentaries.

Israeli Modern Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants, depending on whether the speaker has pharyngeals, and 5 to 10 vowels, depending on whether diphthongs and long and short vowels are counted, depending on the speaker and the analysis.

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The pharyngeal [] for the phoneme chet of Sephardi Modern Hebrew has merged into [] which Sephardi Modern Hebrew only used for fricative chaf.

Syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic but shows the influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed during the revival period and over the past century.

Biblical Modern Hebrew was originally verb–subject–object, but drifted into SVO.

The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20, 000, of which 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i e they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have a Hebrew form.

Simultaneously, Israeli Modern Hebrew makes use of words that were originally loanwords from the languages of surrounding nations from ancient times: Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian.

Mishnaic Modern Hebrew borrowed many nouns from Aramaic, as well as from Greek and to a lesser extent Latin.