Israeli Hebrew Research Articles

Dialetos e Variações Linguísticas do Hebraico Norte-Israelita

O livro de Juízes condensa tradições regionais por meio de um rico intercâmbio de variações linguísticas que pode ser resgatado pela dialetologia. Este artigo teve por objetivo identificar, catalogar e analisar alguns dos múltiplos dialetos existentes no livro de Juízes. O avanço das pesquisas na área da linguística hebraica tem aberto caminhos para a identificação de dialetos, localização e datação de textos da Bíblia Hebraica, como é o caso das obras de Gary A. Rendsburg, William Schniedewind, W. Randall Garr, Ran Zadok, Nadav Naaman e Tania Notarius, os quais formam a base teórica desta pesquisa. O procedimento metodológico adotado aqui seguiu o método da pesquisa de Gary Rendsburg: distribuição, evidências extra bíblicas, oposição e concentração. A hipótese desta pesquisa propõe a existência de dialetos hebraicos norte-israelitas registrados nos textos do livro de Juízes, os quais podem ser identificados, catalogados e analisados seguindo os métodos desta pesquisa.

A pragmatic analysis of descriptive, depictive and simulative reporting speech acts: Empirical evidence from a prosodic study on conversational Modern Israeli Hebrew

The aim of this paper is to investigate the act of reporting an utterance which was produced in a context other than the current interaction. The most common pragmatic approach to the act of reporting concentrates on the relations between the initial speech event and the way it is presented by the different forms of reported speech. Thus, direct and indirect reported speech are often referred to as depictive and descriptive acts respectively. The current paper goes beyond this distinction and considers the reporting act in its entirety as a speech act. Based on contextual sources and constraints allowing the reporting speaker to communicate his/her message in the current interaction, a three-way distinction is proposed between descriptive, depictive and simulative reporting acts, where the latter category refers to direct and indirect reported speech where the apparently reported utterance never took place as such. This three-way distinction is supported by an empirical investigation of F0-patterns in utterances containing reported speech in conversational Modern Israeli Hebrew, showing the influence of different degrees of syntactic and pragmatic continuity/discontinuity on the prosodic structure of utterances containing reported speech.

לתולדות המאבק בין עברית ממסדית לעברית ילידית בישראל

Contemporary popular discourse on Hebrew prescriptivism betrays an interesting ambivalence: acceptance of institutional standards on the one hand and objection to normative intervention on the other. This ambivalence can be traced to the tension between the Language Committee and the Palestine Teachers’ Association during the Second Aliyah. Both advocated that Israel adopt a modern national language, but the former was in favor of a systematic language planning, while the latter was in favor of spontaneous language adoption. In the 1950s, a similar tension developed between the older generation and the Sabras (native speakers), whose generational identity had crystallized during the pre-State period. The language promoted by the former group was an institutional variety bound to a prescriptive norm, while that promoted by the latter was a native variety bound to conventional norms and real-life experience. The tension in these two episodes led to a deep cultural rift—one that is familiar to every Hebrew speaker in Israel—between the formal language of the state and the natural language of Hebrew speakers. A crosslinguistic perspective reveals a resemblance between Israeli Hebrew and European Late Dialect Selection languages, suggesting that the ambivalence towards prescriptivism in fact indicates ambivalence towards the national language, which is perceived, simultaneously, as a manifestation of a stable national identity and an institutional interference in individual speech.

לתולדות המאבק בין עברית ממסדית לעברית ילידית בישראל

Contemporary popular discourse on Hebrew prescriptivism betrays an interesting ambivalence: acceptance of institutional standards on the one hand and objection to normative intervention on the other. This ambivalence can be traced to the tension between the Language Committee and the Palestine Teachers’ Association during the Second Aliyah. Both advocated that Israel adopt a modern national language, but the former was in favor of a systematic language planning, while the latter was in favor of spontaneous language adoption. In the 1950s, a similar tension developed between the older generation and the Sabras (native speakers), whose generational identity had crystallized during the pre-State period. The language promoted by the former group was an institutional variety bound to a prescriptive norm, while that promoted by the latter was a native variety bound to conventional norms and real-life experience. The tension in these two episodes led to a deep cultural rift—one that is familiar to every Hebrew speaker in Israel—between the formal language of the state and the natural language of Hebrew speakers. A crosslinguistic perspective reveals a resemblance between Israeli Hebrew and European Late Dialect Selection languages, suggesting that the ambivalence towards prescriptivism in fact indicates ambivalence towards the national language, which is perceived, simultaneously, as a manifestation of a

Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew

Abstract This paper reassesses the widespread claim in Hebrew linguistics that the medial third person pronoun in the “subject NP + pronoun + predicate” construction in Israeli Hebrew functions either as copula, or as a referential subject in an extrapositional sentence. Based on the examination of this construction in Hebrew conversation, as represented in The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), and based on theoretical considerations, the paper argues that the distinction between copular and referential uses of medial third person pronouns is not justified, leading to the conclusion that apparent “copular” third person pronouns are in fact a second realization of the subject referent, and that sentences containing such pronouns are better viewed as cases of subject doubling. This paper positions subject doubling in the context of typology and language acquisition, and argues for the need to analyze it using natural data, focusing on speaker- and listener- oriented motivations.

Evidence of a T/V distinction in European Hebrew

Abstract This article presents research on the system of T/V distinction in Hebrew from the 16th to the 20th century. As the article is the first attempt to describe the phenomenon, it aims to give a general overview of the T/V distinction in European Hebrew, introducing new language data, and posing new questions. One book served as terminus a quo for the whole article: Course of the Russian Language by Zalkind (Epstein, Zalkind. 1869. Учебная книга Русскаго Языка. מסלת הלמוד או ספר ללמד לשון רוסיא עם העתקה אל לשון עברי [Course of the Russian language. Path of learning or book to study the language of Russia with translation into Hebrew]. Warsaw: Schriftgisser), written in Hebrew, contains approximately 100 pages of everyday dialogues in both Hebrew and Russian. The question of whether the Hebrew language of the 19th century was a dead or living language is still a matter of debate. In that regard, the course book provides valuable material that does not fit into the framework of the general idea of the history of the Hebrew language. Basic elements of conversational politeness are the focus of the analysis. The system, in which V-forms of address are expressed by a third-person singular, is reconstructed from the conversations in the Epstein’s book and traced back to the 16th century in a wide range of various Hebrew sources. The T/V distinction in Hebrew is also compared to the similar phenomena in Polish and German. Originating before the 16th century, the T/V distinction disappeared in modern Israeli Hebrew. However, it is still in use in some specific communication situations, which can be regarded as residues of earlier forms of traditional speech practices.

Conditioned integration during security crises: the role of Israeli sports media from 1996 to 2014

This study examines peace journalism as manifested toward the Israeli Arab minority in a time of seven security crises from 1996 to 2014 in the Israeli Hebrew sports media. Studies of peace journalism in periods of crises focus mainly on political news and find that the media largely conform to alienation practices. This study argues that sports media encourage a ‘conditional integration’ of all actors that participate in the sport. The sports media have three strategies: acknowledging a notion of ‘normalcy’ in which Arabs encourage the maintenance of the sports season at the national and international levels, curtailing alienation practices such as condemning racism and objection to boycott of Arab teams, and encouraging integration that allows the Israeli-Arabs to have a unique voice, as long as they do not openly adopt anti-Israel political stances such as making pro-Hamas or Hezbollah statements. Therefore, sports sections in the news can deepen our understanding of the diverse role of media in times of security crises.

Ridiculing the Female Characters in Israeli Hebrew Children’s Literature – From a Gender-Oriented Stereotype to a Feminist Protest

The differences between the genders and attitudes toward the feminine and masculine domains are already recognizable during early childhood. Blatant sexism can be distinguished in a number of Israeli Hebrew children’s books written several decades ago on the subject of the grotesque woman, and which have become classics still read in preschools. The women in these stories are described as bewildered, confused, and absentminded. Since these Hebrew literary texts are extremely popular among preschool teachers, this article firstly promotes awareness of the issue. Later, this article will suggest a new way of reading that will lead to deeper understanding of the messages and change gender-oriented stereotypes, common in the past, to a feminist protest of the present. Discussion and conversation with children regarding the essence of the gender-oriented viewpoint in shaping the grotesque woman, its motives, and other insights that can be reached through the figure’s activity, conversation, and behaviour, can serve as a tool for the development of a person capable of critical thinking, independence, and having values.

"A Generation of Wonderful Jews Will Grow from the Land": The Desire for Nativeness in Hebrew Israeli Poetry

This article examines the ways in which the desire for nativeness is constructed in Israeli Hebrew poetry through several historical episodes: H. N. Bialik’s poem 1896 poem “In the Field”; the poets as pioneers/immigrants in the 1920s, in contrast to the “nativist” poet Esther Raab; and the “nativist” poets of the 1950s (Statehood Generation), focusing on Moshe Dor. The desire to be native—to belong to the land in a way that is natural, self-evident, and therefore absolute and unquestionable— is one of the constitutive desires of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular. In Bialik’s poem, written during the formative stage of Zionism, this desire emerges as the desire to be a beloved son of mother-earth, which is an allegory for the universal “family of nations.” This desire is realized paradoxically in the form of ownerhip over the land. In the 1920s, the stage of the realization of Zionism, the immigrant pioneers imagine nativeness in the form of their masculine desire of the land as woman—a desire to conquer, fertilize and to own it. The poetry of Raab, being both a biographical native and a woman, exemplifies the “poetics of nativeness.” With the foundation of the State of Israel and the symbolic realization of Zionist desire, nativist poetry (such as the poetry of Moshe Dor) emerges as a poetry of men, who see themselves as the sons of the land, and who are nostalgic about their native position as a lost privilege

The Allographic Use of Hebrew and Arabic in the Samaritan Manuscript Culture

Abstract In the 10th/11th century, Arabic became both the vernacular and literary language of the Samaritan community, along with the two languages of the liturgy: Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic; Samaritan Neo Hebrew was also employed at this time mainly for the composition of religious poems. Together with the introduction of the Arabic language, the Samaritans started to use the Arabic script, along with the Samaritan Hebrew formal and cursive scripts. In comparison with the use of the Arabic script, the Samaritan Hebrew script served mostly for more sacred texts or was employed in order to mark certain textual passages with a higher degree of sacredness. Allography of Arabic in Samaritan Hebrew letters is attested in Samaritan manuscripts since the beginning of the 13th century, although it was introduced most probably at an earlier date. This allography is employed mainly for the Arabic translation of the Samaritan Torah, for the Arabic translations of prayers, and for Samaritan Hebrew or Samaritan Aramaic quotes in Arabic texts. The replacement of Arabic by Modern Israeli Hebrew as the primary vernacular among the Samaritans living in the State of Israel led to a revival of Samaritan Hebrew allography for Arabic texts in the 20th century, mainly in festival poems in Arabic language, which are performed at certain occasions, although not all congregants are still familiar with the Arabic language and script. A close analysis demonstrates that Samaritan Hebrew allography of Arabic is the result of an intense contact between two scribal cultures, both of which were well established amongst the Samaritans. The allographic use of the Samaritan Hebrew script for writing Arabic texts originally did not aim to make these texts more accessible to Samaritan readers, but rather was employed to mark Arabic texts as belonging to the realm of the sacred.

Israeli Hebrew in the Mouths of Native Negev Arabic Speakers: Some Characteristic Interference Features in Phonology, Syntax and Morphology

Israeli Hebrew in the Mouths of Native Negev Arabic Speakers: Some Characteristic Interference Features in Phonology, Syntax and Morphology

Categorical Shifts of the Idiom Ribono shel(a)olam: From a Tannaitic Vocative to a Jewish Theocentric Interjection to a Substrate Component in Israeli Hebrew Discourse

Abstract Oral transmission of the Tannaitic Hebrew double genitive vocative ribbono šella‘olam ‘Master of the Universe’ maintains the definite article in the Hebrew component of two ancient Jewish vernaculars: Jewish Neo-Aramaic and Judeo-Arabic in Djerba. The textual transmission of the phrase, changed it graphemically from the Tannaitic original רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁלָּעוֹלָם into medieval רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם. The new spelling was the source of its final formation in Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, without the definite article. The decategorialization of this double genitive phrase from a theocentric vocative to a semantically bleached interjection in these Jewish languages, especially Yiddish, was the point of departure for its meaning and pragmatic function in nascent spoken Modern Hebrew, as evidence from Mendele’s bilingual oeuvre indicates. It may be tentatively proposed that further grammaticalization and broadening of this substrate component structure-function pairing may have led to the emergence of a new category of analogically constructed discourse markers in Modern Hebrew.

The Matrix Language Turnover Hypothesis: The Case of the Druze Language in Israel

This study examines the language of the Druze community in Israel as going through the process of convergence and a composite Matrix Language formation, resulting in a split language, a.k.a. mixed language, based on Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language turnover hypothesis (2002). Longitudinal data of Palestinian Arabic/Israeli Hebrew codeswitching from the Israeli Druze community collected in 2000 and 2017 indicate that there is a composite Matrix Language formation resulting in a split language. Such a composite involves convergence features in congruence with stage ii of the hypothesis, resulting in a composite morphosyntactic frame. The main features of convergence are the introduction of Israeli Hebrew system morphemes, including early system morphemes, bridge system morphemes and outsider late system morphemes-in some cases appearing independently, but in most cases, in conjunction with content morphemes. There are features of lexical conceptual structures and morphological realization patterns as well. Sociolinguistic factors are suggested as potential motivators for such composite and split language formation.

Inclusive generic person in women's discourse in Israeli Hebrew and Negev Arabic

Generic person is particularly interesting in gendered languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, where the coexistence of (unmarked) masculine and (marked) feminine forms posits a choice when both are applicable. Inclusive generics, i.e. impersonal forms whose scope includes ‘I’ and ‘you’, were analyzed in women's discourse in Israeli Hebrew and Negev Arabic. In the Hebrew corpus, consisting of 7 journalistic interviews with women in both interviewer and interviewee roles, F-you (generic P2f.sg) turned out to be the undisputedly unmarked generic form; M-you (generic P2m.sg) is restricted to very specific contexts, such as shifted viewpoint, a man or a mixed gender group in the speaker's mind. A very different pattern emerged in a Traditional Negev Arabic corpus, representing 7 elderly Bedouin women interviewed by female Bedouin students. Here, the highest ranking form was M-one (generic P3m.sg), followed by M-you. This radical difference fits in with findings of research on cultural discourse patterns that has classified Arabic under the polychronic type, reflecting a relatively depersonalized ‘collective self’ and complementary gender relations. Israeli Hebrew, as reflected in our data base, is closer to the monochronic individualistic, equal gender relation type. The gap between these two types is neatly and consistently filled in by data from the Young Negev Arabic corpus, representing 7 female Bedouin students interviewed by female peers. Their medial position points to the transition which the young Arab generation is undergoing from the traditional Arabic culture to the western culture predominating the Israeli public space.

The Phonology of connected speech in Israeli Hebrew

Abstract Connected speech is a natural, continuous stream of sounds, as in normal conversation, in which natural phonetically-motivated processes optimize articulation (through assimilation, elision, etc.), but are still constrained by the need to maintain morpho-semantic transparency at the receiving end. This paper discusses connected speech in Israeli Hebrew, based mostly on data from a spoken corpus. The paper starts with consonant assimilation (voicing assimilation and total assimilation), and then concentrates on various reduction phenomena: vowel elision or reduction, elision of consonants (with or without adjacent vowels), and the “expanded” elision of multiple segments and even complete morphemes and words. As long as the entity targeted is frequent enough, it can easily be reconstructed from the context by the hearer. We proceed to discuss prosodic phenomena in connected speech: pre-tonic lengthening, whose scope seems to be expanding today, and rhythmic secondary stress alternation.

The phonetics of Modern Hebrew rhotics

Abstract This paper investigates manner variation of Israeli Hebrew rhotics with respect to two factors: prosodic position and speaker gender. An acoustic experimental study shows that although the Hebrew rhotic phoneme tends to be a dorsal approximant, it is significantly more likely to undergo fortition in onset position. This fortition is a result of target overshoot, the rhotic subsequently being produced with a greater degree of constriction than that which would have resulted in an approximant, subsequently surfacing as a stop, a fricative, a tap or a trill. Furthermore, in onset position, female speakers show more variation and produce fewer approximants than male speakers.

Gutturals in General Israeli Hebrew

Abstract Modern Hebrew is written with the traditional Hebrew orthography, which contains several symbols that refer to guttural sounds. However, the pronunciations corresponding to these symbols in Modern Hebrew are not phonetically guttural. This paper is an exhaustive survey of these realizations. It shows that in many cases, there are reasons to think that even though no sound is produced, there is an underlying segment in the position of the historical guttural, and this segment behaves in a predictable manner. That said, alongside this general pattern, there are some effects related to historical gutturals that must be regarded as morpheme-specific, as well as some idiosyncrasies of the different original gutturals.

The meaning of zehu in spoken Israeli Hebrew:

This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as a secondary interjection that conveys the meanings of “completion” and “restriction”. In light of zehu’s morphological makeup – a fusion of the sgm demonstrative ze ‘this’ and the 3sgm pronoun hu ‘he’ – the interjectional use is suggested to have originated in the grammaticalization of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that,’ a clause that is normally used in Israeli Hebrew for the identification of people and objects. Each of the two interjectional meanings conveyed by zehu is suggested to be conceptually linked to the meanings of “wholeness” and “rejection” – meanings that are potentially related to the basic identificational function of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that.’ The interconnection between the meanings of “completion”/ “restriction” and the meanings of “wholeness”/“rejection” is supported by tendencies in semantic change and by patterns of co-speech gestures.

Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures

The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion — namely, ‘negativity’ — rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments.

This is not an interrogative: the prosody of “wh-questions” in Hebrew and the sources of their questioning and rhetorical interpretations

Wh-questions are regarded as a prototypical, nearly universal interrogative construction. Although they can have other functions beside eliciting information, these are considered to be pragmatically special, “rhetorical” usages of the interrogative structure. This study of wh-questions in natural Israeli Hebrew speech demonstrates that taking prosody into account makes this standard view untenable for Hebrew. The analysis of the accentuation of the wh-word and of the final intonation shows that the function of the utterance is compositionally constructed from its basic constituents. The construction is an expression of an open proposition, underspecified with respect to its “prototypical” function. The contribution of the utterance is constructed from the direct marking of a few designated categories, such as interest in gapped information and an appeal to the addressee. In this view, the concepts of “genuine” and different types of “rhetorical” questions break down into different combinations of the basic categories. Moreover, it is the “genuine wh-questions” that exhibit more complex marking and function, compared to structurally more basic “rhetorical wh-questions”.