Hebrew

Ancient Hebrew was the tongue of the ancient Israelites, who were God's chosen people at the time of the Old Testament. Hebrew is a Semitic language, related to Arabic.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The Hebrew Old Testament scriptures contain many prefigurations of the coming Messiah, Jesus Christ. These images are beautiful and poetic.

The original Hebrew died out as a spoken language. Modern Hebrew is a restoration of Ancient Hebrew with many differences to the older form.

Ancient Hebrew grammar distinguished dual, trial, quadruple and quintuple numbers as well as the more common singular and plural forms. This made the language hard for many people to learn. Modern Hebrew has simplified this system greatly. Both forms of Hebrew share the complete lack of sonorants within their phonology. This restriction probably arose for articulatory reasons.

Ancient Hebrew has been claimed to have a recursive grammar, unlike the famous case of Piraha. Many linguists dispute this claim, however, and it has been shown to be conclusively false for modern Hebrew, which has a completely non-recursive grammar.

References

Noam Chomsky, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew". University of Pennsylvania Master's Thesis, 1951.

{stub}