Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 25th Oct 2009 12:51 UTC
A couple of years ago, a professor at my university had a very interesting thought exchange with the class I was in. We were a small group, and I knew most of them, they were my friends. Anyway, we had a talk about language purism - not an unimportant subject if you study English in The Netherlands.
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Member since:
2008-09-11
Interesting factlet—the Hebrew language barely changed at all during the period of the formation of Israel and the beginning of the writing of the Bible until Israel were cut off by the Roman invasion 1500 years later. Essentially since the Holy texts were a core part of their culture and studied at all ages, it acted as a central reference point for the language and prevented wild deviation that would of alienated people from the text.
Regarding Hebrew: it was a dead language like latin spoken for 2000 yars only by some clerics. Exactly like latin. That's why it didn't change. And after creation of Israel it was forcefully enforced as the state language. I mean, at the time the State of Israel was formed, the vast majority of hebrews didn't spoke hebrew. They spoke english, yddish, french, russian, etc.