[lojban-beginners] OT: Talmud and Hebrew

[turnip <turnip@bcpl.net>]

>===== Original Message From "Yoav Nir" <yoav.nir@gmail.com> =====
>Something like that, although I think the bible is more similar to modern
>Hebrew than Shakespere is to modern English. This is somewhat intentionally
>so. Ben Yehuda and his followers began from the biblican language and
>rejected much of the early-CE development of the language that was heavily
>influenced by Aramaic and Greek.
>In fact, the 2500-year old bible looks much more familiar than the merely
>1600-year-old talmud.

  Well, hold on a sec (sorry about the offtopicness), but while the Mishnah 
was written in Hebrew, the Gemorah (i.e. the majority of the Talmud)was 
written unabashedly in Aramaic (basically except where they are quoting 
mishnayot, baraitot, and tanakh).  And it's full of phrases that are shorthand 
phrases that stand for complex concepts (ex. "p'sik reisha" (literally, "cut 
off its head") to mean "An activity, that while in and of itself is not a 
violation of the Sabbath, would inevitably lead to a violation", or "lo shanu 
ela" ("They did not teach but...") to explain qualifications to halacha).  So 
of course an Israeli who doesn't have a background in the specialized 
technical use of the Aramaic would have great difficulty understanding a page 
picked at random, just as a native speaker of English would difficulty 
understanding a modern day law book or medical text, unless that was their 
field.

  By comparison, as Yoav said, reading Biblical Hebrew is much easier (for an 
Israeli). There are certain grammatical differences, like the vav hahipuch and 
the habit of Biblical Hebrew to agglutinize the objective pronouns onto the 
verb, but those are very easy to learn.

   As far as Ben Yehuda goes, another extremely importnat point to understand 
that his generation wasn't necessarily the most fluent in Hebrew, but since 
they spoke nothing but that tongue around the children of the settlement, 
those children picked it up naturally.  It remains to be seen whether children 
could do the same with lojban (sorry, my kids are all too old for fluent 
language acuisition, and none of them are that interested in lojban anyhow (my 
10yo gave me a coupon on my birthday for "1 hour of lojban teaching", showing 
that he had to be "forced" into it :-)  (My 15yo prefers Japanese, my 12yo 
Latin, and all five of them are learning Herbrew (and the older three Aramaic) 
My dog, on the other hand, seems patient with learning lojban....
>
>It's definitely more familiar than anything written in the British isles
>1600 or 2500 years ago.
>
>On 10/24/07, Jared Angell <angell.jared@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> My understanding was that my friends did have a hard time reading
>> ancient Hebrew as much of the grammar is dissimilair.  That is just
>> what I heard from at least half a dozen people, perhaps it is not much
>> different than modern American English and Elizabethan English???
>>
>>
                     --gejyspa