Bulletin

Issue: March 2005

Visitors

Speaking Israeli - Language on hybrid wings

Question: When somebody describes something you hold dear as a ‘phoenicuckoo hybrid’, what is he describing?

Hint: This particular ‘phoenicuckoo hybrid’ is used daily by most of the 6.8 million citizens of Israel.

Answer: It is the language described variously as Israeli, Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, or Hebrew – and it is most certainly a ‘phoenicuckoo hybrid’, according to La Trobe University Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Dr Ghil‘ad Zuckermann.

Dr Zuckermann, a world renowned linguist and specialist on the origins and workings of this language, is based at La Trobe’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology.

He says that Israeli, his term for so-called ‘Modern Hebrew’ – which has been a spoken tongue for only 100 years – is a hybrid because both Hebrew and Yiddish act equally as its primary contributors, accompanied by many secondary contributors which include Polish, Russian, German, Arabic, English and Judaeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino.

Because of these many influences, he believes ‘Israeli’ is a far more appropriate title for the language than ‘Israeli Hebrew’, let alone ‘Modern Hebrew’ or just plain ‘Hebrew’.

Israeli emerged among Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who settled in Palestine at the end of the 19th century. During the past 50 years, it has become the official language of Israel, the primary mode of communication in all state and local institutions and in all areas of public and private life.

Dr Zuckermann shows that the ‘genetic classification’ of Israeli has preoccupied linguists for a century. ‘The still prevalent, traditional school of thought suggests that Israeli is Semitic, a revival of Biblical or Mishnaic Hebrew. ‘I call this theory the “phoenix model” as in the phoenix rising from the ashes,’ Dr Zuckermann says.

‘Jews spoke Hebrew after the so-called conquest of Israel around the 13th century BC but the language ceased to be spoken by the Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in 132-5 AD. In a period of repression which followed, the Jewish population in Judea was largely exterminated through massacres, religious persecution, slavery and forced relocation.

‘For more than 1,700 years thereafter, Hebrew was comatose. It served as a liturgical and literary language and occasionally also as a lingua franca for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a mother tongue. As a vernacular, it was a “walking dead” or, to put it more optimistically, a “sleeping beauty”.

‘Another school of thought, by contrast, defines Israeli as Indo-European – a kind of “relexified” Yiddish. Yiddish is the “substratum”, whilst Hebrew is only a “superstratum”, providing the vocabulary and lexicalized morphology. I call this the “cuckoo model”, as the cuckoo lays eggs in the nest of another bird.

‘However, my own mosaic, rather than Mosaic, view is that Israeli is simultaneously Semitic and Indo-European. The contribution of Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue was not intentional, hence the term “semi-engineered” can be applied. Yiddish, with Hebrew, acts as a primary contributor rather than as a “substratum” so Israeli falls into a mixed category of its own, as a “phoenicuckoo hybrid”.

‘As a result of a number of distinctive characteristics – including the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from Hebrew to Israeli – Israeli presents the linguist with a unique laboratory in which to test problems concerning language genesis and evolution,’ he says.

Dr Zuckermann, who holds doctorates from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, has published in English, Israeli, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German and Russian. His most recent book, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2003. A new book, Hebrew as Myth, is scheduled to be published this year, and he is preparing a further volume entitled Mosaic or mosaic?: The Genesis of the Israeli Language.