Israel-bashers are going to love this:
An Israeli linguist is insisting that the modern Hebrew is a semi-engineered European-hybrid language that is different from the language of the old testament and should therefore be described as Israeli, drawing immediate fire and criticism.
"Israelis are brainwashed to believe they speak the same language as (the prophet) Isaiah, a purely Semitic language," Ghil'ad Zuckermann, a 35-year-old graduate of Tel Aviv University with doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, told Reuters, Wednesday, November 29.
"But this is false," insists the Israeli-British language specialist.
During a lecture tour to promote his soon-to-be-published polemic "Hebrew as Myth", Zuckermann argued that modern Hebrew should be renamed "Israeli" and give up its claim of pure descent from holy writ.
"It's time we acknowledge that Israeli is very different from the Hebrew of the past."
He asserts that today's language is very much influenced by modern European dialects, especially Yiddish, Russian and Polish.
The professor says the proof of linguistic discontinuity is that Hebrew had been in decline as far back as the 1st century.
It had to be revived by 19th-century Zionist pioneers and lexicographers after 1,700 years in which it was no one's native tongue, Zuckermann added.
"The contemporary resurrection is remarkable, of course, but it does mean that the natural evolution you see, say, between Anglo-Saxon to Middle English to Modern English does not exist between Hebrew and Israeli."
Except that Hebrew had a rather robust existence as a literary language and actually its peculiar history has led to a situation where ancient and modern Hebrew resemble each other to a *greater* degree than ancient and modern versions of the same language usually do. Zuckerman's example of "natural evolution" is English. So let's look at the first sentence of Beowulf:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Obviously the language of Tanach is much more accessible to a typical secularly-educated Israeli than Beowulf is to the average speaker of Modern English. Judging from this article at any rate, Zuckerman seems to be chasing after notions of linguistic purity that don't exist for any modern language and that nobody is arguing for where Modern Hebrew is concerned.
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