posted
I'm very aware of what they call it. However, names aren't the best indicator of what something is. It bears little resemblance to what we think of as English.
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posted
[association] Well, I saw a book last year. A book studied by my friend's sister for school. It was a book with a couple of Shakespeare's plays. It had a lovely font, other than that it was pathetic.
On the one side it had William Shakespeare's texts, written in a linear format (as it's metrical), and in the original form, just elegantly reformed with a new, cleared font.
On the other side was the "corrected", "updated" version, written in modern, spoken English, completely out of meter (in paragraph form - one paragraph a character's line), and the spelling was updated into the modern American spelling.
Now, that's massacring our favourite Billy; that's modern English. [/association]
quote: You should have a better reason for your actions than "My mother told me to."
It's for the same reason I write "realise" and not "realize": it's one of two forms, and that is the one I read and used first. I use "appendices" bcause it's more natural to me. That's for the same reason I say "ad-VER-tis-ment", not "ad-ver-TISE-ment".
Jon Boy - you try understanding the Bible in Hebrew after you learned modern Hebrew as a native - it's not very easy. Most of the words you can understand, but if you're not religious (meaning: if you don't start learning around the age of six, after memorising nursery rhymes earlier) then the forms are quite difficult to master. Maybe that explains why the top people in the Hebrew Language Academy are religious and know a lot of Bible and Gemarra.
So yes, I'm talking about dead forms. Biblical Hebrew is a dead form. I can barely read Job, and I probably have some of the vastest vocabulary and some of the best Biblical reading-skills in my class. So what? It's still a dead form of a language.
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I was simply arguing semantics. Of course ancient Hebrew is dead, and of course it's different from modern Hebrew. I was just saying that the difference between them is more fundamental than one being alive while the other is dead (presumably, of course—I don't speak Hebrew).
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quote: the difference between them is more fundamental than one being alive while the other is dead
I lost you there. Ancient Hebrew is dead at the same time modern Hebrew is alive - for instance right at this moment.
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posted
I mean that it's not simply a version of modern Hebrew that isn't spoken or that stopped being spoken. The differences in grammar and phonology are probably much more significant. (Of course, Hebrew might not be the best example of this—I don't know the exact relationship of modern Hebrew to ancient Hebrew.)
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posted
The relationship between biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is much more along the lines of that between Middle English and modern than Old English and modern. (I think.)
In part, this is because for hundreds of years, biblical Hebrew was as dead as Latin, and used only as a language of scholarship. Only about 100 years ago, Ben Yehuda revived it as a modern language. He deliberately changed certain things from biblical Hebrew, but left many things the same. In fact, in many ways modern Hebrew is closer to biblical Hebrew than to the (considerably more recent) Talmudic Hebrew.
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posted
And yet, people find the Mishnaic Hebrew far easier to understand than the Biblical Hebrew. I find it easier to read, even though it's got a far different vocbulary.
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