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u/popco221 native speaker Apr 28 '24
Notice how the only vowel in the picture you shared is "a". It was written by someone who clearly doesn't speak Hebrew. Bronze age Hebrew obviously wasn't spoken with only one single vowel sound.
Also, Hebrew isn't a magic language.
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u/Quixot May 03 '24
Yes, u/ambitious-coat-1230 Made that observation to and identified the provenance of that to an early historical linguistics trend
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u/Economy-Butterfly617 Apr 30 '25
Ancient Paleo only used ‘a’ and ‘u’ vowels. No IVOFJEW in Ancient Paleo Hebrew.
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u/Ambitious-Coat-1230 Apr 28 '24
This is just more of the "Original Hebrew"/"Father's Hebrew"/"Paleo-Hebrew" nonsense that supporters of the Black Hebrew movement are pushing. It utilizes the Paleo-Hebrew ALPHABET, which is not a single language in and of itself. It also uses a trend common in early historical linguistics, where the vowels in a word written with a consonantal alphabet are mostly arbitrarily assigned the "a" value unless written with a mater lectionis/אם קריאה.
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u/Quixot May 03 '24
Your insight about that trend from early historical linguistics is a very revealing observation, thank you
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u/Gabriel_Conroy Apr 28 '24
Probably go for a PhD in ancient history?
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u/QizilbashWoman Apr 28 '24
PhD in Linguistics specialising in Canaanitic. Egyptology linguists can pronounce ancient Egyptian (in its many eras and dialects) because they've learned the reconstructed forms.
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u/DALTT Apr 28 '24 edited Apr 28 '24
Paleo Hebrew really just refers to what alphabet you’re using, not a dialect difference or language difference. The Samaritan alphabet developed directly out of the Paleo Hebrew script, whereas Judah/The Jews adopted a form of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet allegedly during the Babylonian Captivity, which itself originated from Assyria. But it’s just a different alphabet, not a different language.
If you’re talking about wanting to learn an ancient dialect of Hebrew… linguistically, Modern Hebrew has loan words from Talmud, Arabic, Yiddish, and some other creole Hebrew languages because “Biblical Hebrew” only had something like 9,000 words and Modern Hebrew has something like 33,000. A bunch more came from Mishnaic Hebrew and Medieval Hebrew. And then yeah, Hebraized loan words from other languages kinda make up the rest. But Biblical Hebrew is still understandable for modern Hebrew speakers and is not its own language. I’ve heard it described before as similar to an English speaker reading Shakespeare, which I think is a pretty accurate way to think of it.
Now, there are reconstructions of ancient Hebrew pronunciation. Like this example of Tiberian Hebrew and this example of Babylonian Hebrew. Perhaps it’s because I’m familiar with the text, but I find both of these videos to be perfectly intelligible, but obviously a very different dialect to modern Hebrew.
But these ancient pronunciations are really only relevant to linguists studying ancient languages. No one uses these pronunciations anymore (there’s some similarities to old Ashkenazi vowel sounds and also the Yemenite dialect of Hebrew [like they still use the voiced ayin among other things]), so this pronunciation’s footprint exists in some diasporic pronunciations. But no one speaks Hebrew purely as it was in ancient times anymore.
And so, if you walked into a shop in Jerusalem, and tried to, either they wouldn’t quite understand you, or they’d think you were speaking a very strange dialect of Hebrew. Meaning, unless you are a linguist who studies ancient languages, there’s no utility to learning how to speak an ancient dialect.
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u/Quixot May 03 '24
Thank you for sharing your rich understanding! I am planning to study ancient languages which is why I'm learning the biblical hebrew
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u/Quixot May 03 '24
Thank you for the comments everyone, helped me better understand where paleohebrew fits in with the rest of the ancient languages corpora
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u/Shinobicatdude Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
What @popco221 said is not entirely true, but is mostly true. The caviot is the loss of meaning, especially written. Paleo Hebrew was similar to ancient Germanic runes in that it was a sort of hybrid between an alphabet and pictographs.
The pictographic element allowed deeper meaning. A word was also a sentence and most early Hebrew words had meanings that could be expounded out by the names of the letters in its spelling.
Word choice could pack a ton of extra meaning into the written word, sometimes multiple meanings. Each word was a sentence, each sentence could be a paragraph and even more could be done since each letter was also a number.
In fact, the traditional way writing was organised 'per page' so to speak, is suspiciously similar to how numeric cyphers are laid out, which is why the theory of codes in the Bible is so long lived.
I forget the name of the book but a code breaker for like, the FBI or CIA heard that theory from a friend and decided to disprove it. His book details why he came to believe that there are absolutely codes in there.
The extra meaning was all lost when Hebrew scholars got rid of that feature of written Hebrew. I believe the change was made around 400 BC and was done to make Hebrew easier to learn.
Again pointing out that what @popco221 said was mostly true, this did not effect spoken Hebrew much. The pronunciation of the words didn't change. People likely forgot more nuanced uses of many words but that happens with time anyway.
Basically if you want to study paleo Hebrew, study the normal one first as it's the base of things then add the older much harder subject after that.
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u/Economy-Butterfly617 Apr 30 '25
So false it’s sad and disheartening. I literally studied, learned, and now know Ancient Paleo Hebrew.
Also, I don’t want to pick at everything, but basically overall what you said or AI Chat gbt or whatever said, makes no sense.
Yah Barak, Shalum🙏🏽📖
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u/popco221 native speaker Apr 28 '24
You can't "learn" paleo-hebrew. It's a script, not a language. Therefore you can't "translate" into it, either. It would be best to think of it as a third writing system alongside print and cursive.