(((I Will Outlive)))

not dead languages but dad languages

My friend just sent this to me and said “you will appreciate this” and she was VERY correct

Christians: We can still hear its voice Hebrew language: QUIT TELLING EVERYONE I’M DEAD!

Hebrew WAS dead, but then this guy was like “hey we shouldn’t only be speaking like French/Romanian/whatever else we should speak Hebrew because we’re Jews and that’s cool” and then he went and made Hebrew a thing again.

Just like with all revived languages, we’re not 110% sure what the original was exactly like but we’re pretty close.

(Also I’d like to let everyone know that it’s on Duolingo if you want to learn it)

Yup, thats right!

Super important to note here that a language being “dead” does NOT mean we don’t understand it, it means that language has no one who speaks it as their first language, and no words are being added to it. That actually makes dead languagea crystallize and preserve, and we understand many dead languages like that BETTER, because they are finite and limited.

As far as being not totally sure what the original was, but close, theres two aspects to that, pronunciation and vocabulary.

We AREN’T 100% sure of pronunciation of ancient Hebrew, but the pronunciations we use today arent pulled out of thin air. They were handed down through thousands of years of fluent speakers. Did a few consonants and vowels shift a little? Probably, it happens in languages all the time. Were there different dialects of Hebrew accent, like there are today? Probably, because other ancient semetic languages seem to have had multiple accents. But by comparing the different accents and dialects of Hebrew that survived with the pronunciation of closely related languages, we can strongly infer things about how ancient Hebrew sounded (and why modern Hebrew sounds like it does today).

As far as vocabulary, there are a few issues - we only have the written account and what was handed down verbally, so there were obviously some words that never were recorded, and have been lost. That’s okay, it happens in every language. Scholars think there was an entirely different grammar system for the lower class Latin speakers, but we arent totally sure what it was because they didnt record it all, by nature of being less educated. Additionally, there are things now that there just werent words for in ancient Hebrew, like computer. So we just created them based on the rules of Hebrew roots, just like how the word computer was made in English but didn’t exist in old English. Finally, theres some few words for specific nouns, things like species of bird or types of gemstone, that we just arent 100% sure about. Sometimes we know some stuff about that word - it was definitely a red gemstone, definitely a predatory bird, etc. But we arent 100% sure. Fortunately though in those instances, we have thousands of years of Mishnaic and Talmudic and Rabbinic commentary, passed down orally, which helps us fill in some of those gaps in knowledge.

Ancient and modern Hebrew are actually pretty mutually inelligable - think maodern English and Shakespeare, not modern English and Beowulf. And the language was never “lost,” being “dead” just means it was frozen in place for a bit.