0 Introduction œ1X - Hebrew University of edit/edit/JJL-Doron- Introduction Edit
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What is the relation between Hebrew in the pre-modern period and its contem-porary form Modern Hebrew? Hebrew ceased to be spoken by native speakers at the beginning of the 3rd century CE but has been used as a liturgical, schol-arly, legal, and cultural language of Jewish communities world-wide. Modern Hebrew (MH), since the early 20th century, has been the native language of the Jewish community in Palestine and later Israel. Given these historical facts, the question is often asked whether Modern Hebrew could possibly be, from a linguistic perspective, a stage in the development of Hebrew, transmitted from earlier stages. In the view of its speakers and traditional scholars, it undoubt-edly is.1 According to one radical linguistic hypothesis, however, it is not; rather it is a creole2 based on a substrate of contact languages (particularly Yiddish, the native language of many of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine), and a Hebrew superstrate, serving solely as a lexifier.3
The present collection is a first attempt to present detailed analysis of the syntax of Modern Hebrew (MH), which goes beyond the controversy between the traditional and the radical views. More specifically, it aims at laying the grounds for a theoretically sound approach to the genesis of MH. Before intro-ducing these studies, a brief historical overview might be necessary.4
* The project presented in this volume started out with the work and findings of the mem-bers of the 20132016 Research Group on the emergence of Modern Hebrew at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who have all contributed chapters to this volume. I would like to thank the Mandel Scholion center for providing generous support to our group, and the JJL editors, Sarah Bunin Benor and Ofra Tirosh-Becker, for hosting a special thematic vol-ume and for the immense editorial work they have invested in its publication. I am grateful to Chanan Ariel, Miri Bar-Ziv Levy, Malka Rappaport Hovav, and Yael Reshef for their help with writing this introduction.
1 Reshef, forthcoming.2 Wexler 1990, following Holm 1988; Izreel 2001.3 For the relexification view of the nature of creoles see Lefebvre 1998. 4 For more detailed information about the various stages of Hebrew, I refer the reader
to Harshav 1999 and to the relevant articles in the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Khan et al. 2013).
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Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language at the end of the 2nd century CE. Between this period and the time of the establishment of MH as a spoken language in Palestine, Hebrew consisted of a large body of writings contain-ing a core of scripture, liturgical and traditional legal works, and an extensive range of scholarly and literary works. The central religious works were read and studied and used in worship over the centuries in Jewish communities in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, but also as far as Central Asia, India, and China. The language of all the writings contained elements of the earliest stages of written Hebrew that emerged when Hebrew was still a language with native speakers, and also elements of the written language from subsequent periods when it was no longer spoken.5
The written texts of Hebrew that emerged when it was still a spoken lan-guage are classified into two main corpora. These are the Old Testament, com-posed before the Common Era (Biblical Hebrew) and the Mishnah and related texts (Mishnaic Hebrew). Mishnaic texts, although composed in a period when Hebrew was a language with native speakers, are traditionally classified as part of Rabbinic Hebrew, together with the Talmud and other texts which were composed after Hebrew ceased to be spoken. This joint classification is due 