Hebrew

Phono-Semantic Matching

by
Ghilad 1 scaled

Phono-Semantic Matching (henceforth, PSM) is a camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign lexical item is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root. The neologism resulting from this source of lexical expansion preserves both the meaning and the approximate sound of the reproduced expression in the Source Language (SL) with the help of pre-existent Target Language (TL) elements. (Neologism is used here in its broader meaning, i.e. either an entirely new lexical item or a TL pre-existent word whose meaning has been altered, resulting in a new sense.) The following figure is a general illustration of this process:

Figure 1

Such multisourced neologization is common inter alia in two key language groups:

(1) languages using a phono-logographic script that … ↪

The Survival of Yiddish beneath Israeli

by
Phenicuckoo Cross Zuckermann

Today it is Hebrew Language Day. It is each year on 21 tevet, which is Eliezer Ben Yehuda‘s birthday. For that occasion, Ghil’ad Zuckermann displays his view on the underlying roots of the Israeli language.
First, a little background information:

Background on the Hebrew language

Hebrew was spoken after the so-called conquest of Canaan (c. thirteenth century BC). Following a gradual decline (even Jesus, ‘King of the Jews’, was a native speaker of Aramaic rather than Hebrew), it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judaea in AD 132-5 marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. For more than 1700 years thereafter, Hebrew was comatose, … ↪