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The Hebrew Language....
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Fragment of
Genesis in hebrew language
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Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken
by 6 million people mainly in Israel, parts of the Palestinian
territories, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world.
The core of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah (which
Christianity and Judaism
traditionally hold to have been first recorded in the time of
Moses 3,300
years ago), is written in (Biblical) Classical Hebrew. Jews have always
called it Lashon ha-Kodesh ("The Sacred Language") as the
scriptures written in this language were considered sacred.
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After the first Destruction of Jerusalem by the
Babylonians in 586 BCE, most scholars agree that the kind of Hebrew
prevalent in the Hebrew Bible was replaced in daily use by Mishnaic Hebrew
and a local version of the Aramaic language. After the depletion of the Jewish population
of parts of Roman occupied Judea, it is believed that Hebrew gradually
ceased to be a spoken language roughly around 200 CE, but has stayed as the
major written language throughout the centuries. |
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Not only religious, but texts for a large variety of
purposes: letters and contracts, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry,
protocols of courts—all resorted to Hebrew, which thus adapted itself to
various new fields and terminologies by borrowings and new inventions. Ben Yehuda is considered to be the father of the modern
hebrew language his role
was great in adding new hebrew words his picture to the right.
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Ben Yehuda Father of
Modern Hebrew
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Modern Hebrew became an official language in
British
Palestine in 1921, and the primary official language of the State of
Israel, Hebrew was revitalized as a spoken language during the late
19th and early 20th century as Modern Hebrew, replacing a score of
languages spoken by the Jews at that time, such as Arabic, Judezmo (also
called Ladino), Yiddish, Russian, and other languages. |
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