Skip to main content Skip to main menu Skip to search Skip to footer. Search for:. Manage subscription. Subscribe to the Monitor. Monitor Daily current issue. Monitor Weekly digital edition. Community Connect. People Making a Difference. Points of Progress. A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photo Galleries.
About Us. Get stories that empower and uplift daily. See our other FREE newsletters. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. Select free newsletters: The Weekender. Today's Highlights.
Christian Science Perspective. Victor Mazuz. By Dina Kraft Correspondent dinakraft. Tel Aviv. Why We Wrote This Finding a common language, perhaps especially in a multilingual environment, is key to social cohesion.
You've read of free articles. Subscribe to continue. He codified Hebrew grammar, wrote the first modern dictionary, and coined words necessary for a modern vocabulary. Ben-Yehuda and his first wife, Devora Jonas also a linguist spoke only Hebrew to their son, Itamar, who became the first primarily Hebrew-speaking person in the modern world. From the initial determination of the Ben-Yehuda family and their friends, the Hebrew language, with its uniqueness and vitality, was brought back to life.
Modern Hebrew is being stretched by the hour by its Israeli speakers as they take the language and vocabulary of a laconic, pastoral Iron Age civilization and reshape it to the needs of an enormously cosmopolitan, gregarious, heterogeneous society of the 21st century. Written in its own alphabet, Hebrew must be transliterated into the Latin alphabet for non-Hebrew speakers. The varying ways in which Hebrew names are transliterated is sure to confuse you—most places seem to have several different names and spellings.
Is it Jaffa, Joppa, or Yafo? Safed, Safad, Zfat, or Zefat? The confusion stems partly from Israel's long history, partly from myriad cultures and languages, and partly from Hebrew itself. Vowels are not normally written in Hebrew this is also true of Arabic , and so in transliteration you get such unpronounceable words as Sde for Sede and Sderot Sederot.
This is the most ancient place in the state of Israel. King David established the Kingdom of Judah from here. So once a week for the last three years, she has walked over to the Jerusalem Intercultural Center on nearby Mount Zion for a three-hour Arabic class. This year, of course, the class is on Zoom rather than in person. Arabic is a difficult language and a challenge, she admits, but her neighbors appreciate her efforts.
Katzover is not alone. More Jewish Israelis are taking classes in spoken Arabic than ever before, both in formal and informal frameworks. One of the largest informal frameworks is Madrasa, a free online site which has 80, registered users and a wide social media presence. The Arabic is taught in transliteration, so there is no need to learn the Arabic letters.
Each lesson is broken down into digestible videos, most four or five minutes long, including dialogues and explanations of grammar. There is no charge to register for the courses. Sevitt was referring to one of the most frustrating characteristics of Arabic that every student of the language encounters. Arabic is not really one language, but a series of languages. There is classical Arabic, which is the language of the Quran, as well as modern Standard Arabic fusha , which is the language of newspapers and radio broadcasts.
While most native Arabic speakers will understand you if you speak in modern standard Arabic, they might laugh at you. The dialects also differ, sometimes to a large extent. Many years ago, I spent a year living in Egypt and studying Egyptian Arabic. When I spoke in Egyptian Arabic in Jerusalem, people would burst out laughing, saying I sounded like an actor in the melodramatic Egyptian films that were once screened on Israel Television on Friday afternoons. Israeli schools, if they teach Arabic at all, teach Modern Standard Arabic.
Students spend the better part of a year learning the alphabet and often finish without being able to speak to anyone.
That lack of communication intensifies the separation between Jews and Arabs, says Gilad Sevitt of Madrasa. Almost half of Jewish in Israel originated in Arabic-speaking countries and a lot of our religious texts were written in Arabic. Arabic was a crucial part of the Jewish heritage.
Some students of Arabic are going even further than just studying. The title itself is an idiom. The idioms in the book are not proverbs which sometimes have a taint of Orientalism, and focus on camels and coffee, Berman says. Berman says there has been a dramatic increase in Israelis studying spoken Arabic. He adds that his language study has also moved him to the left politically. The more you speak the language and are able to speak with Arabs, you realize that the situation is not black and white.
Snir says that there are sometimes political arguments in class, which is fine with him as long as the arguments take place in Arabic. He says that the reason that most people study Arabic has also changed — a change he welcomes. Arabic is hard, and that is a better motivation. Rabbi Elhanan Miller, who teaches Arabic and makes videos explaining Judaism in Arabic said he once taught an Arabic class in the Jewish settlement of Tekoa.
0コメント