“For various reason of aesthetics and national interests, the famed Hebrew lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the 1913 Hebrew Language Council tended to side with the contemporary Sephardi pronunciation, ultimately resulting in the minimization of the number of consonant and vowel sounds in modern Hebrew. This change followed earlier Haskala reforms that attempted to create a […]
“For well over 70 years now, the standard dialect taught in Yiddish schools has been and still is the ‘northeastern’ one, similar if not always identical to that which was spoken in Vilna. (One difference is that in Vilna Yiddish, veynen can mean both ‘to reside’ and ‘to cry.’ In standard Yiddish, ‘to reside’ isvoynen.) “And yet in […]
(Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times. The Isaiah Scroll was one of seven ancient Hebrew texts discovered in 1947, and is the best preserved and most complete.)
“Its revival is often hailed as one of the greatest feats of the Zionist enterprise; today Hebrew is the first language of millions of Israelis, a loquacious and […]
