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They called it Hebrew and consciously aspired to be faithful to its historical legacy.10 A full educational system was instituted, run entirely in Hebrew, from kindergarten11 all the way to university.12 In 1922, Hebrew was granted the sta-tus of official language, alongside English and Arabic, of the British Mandate for Palestine. In 1948, Hebrew was proclaimed the official language of the state of Israel together with Arabic.
Overview of Contributions
The chapters in the present volume document syntactic structures novel to Modern Hebrew (MH) and investigate the origins of the innovation, looking for parallel structures in the contact languages and also for possible internal precursors of these structures. The results of the study have direct bearing on the controversy regarding the nature of MH. If the genesis of MH followed a creolization process, where Hebrew was but a lexifier, the novel syntactic structures of MH should not be developments of previous Hebrew structures, but should be accounted for solely on the basis of the syntax of the contact languages. The converse does not hold if the genesis of MH was based on trans-mission from previous stages of Hebrew. That is, assuming that MH results from transmission, there is still room for the influence of contact languages. Even if MH was transmitted from previous stages of Hebrew, this could not be the familiar transmission by native