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Language, Religion and Identity in Israel
Where: Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Main Building, UCL, Gower Street, LONDON, The Institute of Jewish Studies, Public Lecture Series When: 3rd February 2009, 6pm - 8pm
Reception: 6.15pm in the Terrace Restaurant; Lecture: 6.45pm in the GUSTAVE TUCK THEATRE
LikeWhere: Room 9, Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Sidgwick Avenue, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, Department of Middle Eastern Studies When: 30th October 2008, 5pm - 6pm
“The greatest virtue of a new word is that it is not new.” (Yechiel Michal Pínes, 1893)
versus
“It is absolutely impossible to empty out words filled to bursting, unless one does so at the expense of language itself.” (Gershom Scholem, 26 December 1926)
One of the problems facing those attempting to revive Hebrew as the national language of the emerging State of Israel was that of Hebrew lexical voids. The ‘revivalists’ attempted to use mainly internal sources of lexical enrichment but were faced with a paucity of roots. They changed the meanings of obsolete Hebrew terms to fit the modern world. This infusion often entailed the secularization of religious terms. This lecture will explore the phenomenon of semantic secularization, as in the politically-neutral process visible in English cell ‘monk’s living place’ > ‘autonomous self-replicating unit from which tissues of the body are formed’. The main focus, however, is on secularizations involving ideological ‘lexical engineering’, as often exemplified by – either conscious or subconscious, either top-down or bottom-up – manipulative, subversive processes of extreme semantic shifting, pejoration, amelioration, trivialization, allusion and echoing.
An example of defying religion is blorít. Mishnaic Hebrew [b’lorit] is ‘Mohawk, an upright strip of hair that runs across the crown of the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck’, characteristic of the abominable pagan and not to be touched by the Jewish barber. But defying religious values, secular Socialist Zionists use blorít with the meaning ‘forelock, hair above the forehead’, which becomes one of the defining characteristics of the Sabra (‘prickly pear’, a nickname for native Israelis, allegedly thorny on the outside and sweet inside). Is the ‘new Jew’ ultimately a pagan?
This negation of religion fascinatingly adds to the phenomenon of negation of the Diaspora, exemplified in the blorít itself by Zionists expecting the Sabra to have dishevelled hair, as opposed to the orderly diasporic Jew, who was considered by Zionists to be weak and persecuted.
An example of the complementary phenomenon, deifying Zionism, is mishkán. Biblical Hebrew [mishkån] means ‘Tabernacle of the Congregation’ (where Moses kept the Ark in the wilderness), ‘inner sanctum’ (known as [‘ohel mo`ed]). Israeli mishkán aknéset, however, refers to ‘the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) building’. Translating mishkán haknéset as ‘The Knesset Building’ (as in the official Knesset website) is lacking. The word mishkán is loaded with holiness and evokes sanctity, as if MKs (Members of Knesset, i.e. MPs) were at the very least angels or seraphs.
In line with the prediction made by the Kabbalah-scholar Gershom Scholem in a letter to Franz Rosenzweig (Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache, 1926), some ultra-orthodox Jews have tried to launch a ‘lexical vendetta’: using secularized terms like ‘dormant agents’, as a shortcut to religious concepts, thus trying to convince secular Jews to go back to their religious roots.
The study of Israeli cultural linguistics and socio-philology casts light on the dynamics between language, religion and identity in a land where fierce military battles with external enemies are accompanied by internal Kulturkämpfe.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ghil’ad ZUCKERMANN , D.Phil. (Oxon.), M.A. (Tel Aviv) (summa cum laude), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He has been Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has taught in Israel, Singapore, England and USA , and has held research posts in Bellagio (Italy), Austin (Texas), Melbourne and Tokyo. His publications – in English, Israeli, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese – include the books Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli, a Beautiful Language, Am Oved, 2008). He is currently working on two further books: (1) Language Genesis and Multiple Causation, and (2) Language, Religion and Identity. His website is http://www.zuckermann.org/
Where: Ground Floor Lecture Room, 47 Wellington Square, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, Oxford Linguistic Circle http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/pages/seminars/lingcircle.html When: 28th October 2008, 5am - 6pm
Dedicated to the memory of Prof. Geoffrey L. Lewis
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
'Who will guard the guardians themselves?'
(Iuvenalis, Satirae, vi, 347-8).
Over the past century, Israeli – somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. 'Modern Hebrew' – has become the primary mode of communication in all domains of public and private life in Israel. Linguistic issues are so sensitive in Israel that politicians are often involved. For example, in an article in Ha'aretz (June 21, 2004), left-wing politician Yossi Sarid attacked the (most widespread) 'common language of éser shekel' as inarticulate and monstrous, and urged citizens to take up arms, fight it and protect "Hebrew". However, most Israelis say éser shékel 'ten shekels' rather than asar-á shkal-ím, the latter literally meaning 'ten (feminine) shekels (masculine plural)', and thus having a 'polarity-of-gender agreement' - with a feminine numeral and a masculine plural noun. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for Hebrew, the Academy of the Hebrew Language prescribes standards for Israeli grammar, lexis, orthography, transcription and vocalization (vowel marking) 'based upon the study of Hebrew's historical development'. This lecture will provide a critical analysis of the Academy's mission, as intriguingly defined in its constitution: 'to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature' (sic). It will shed light on the dynamics of the committees' meetings, and expose some U-turn decisions recently made by the Academy. I will suggest that the Academy has begun submitting to the 'real world', accommodating its decrees to the parole of native Israeli speakers, long regarded as 'reckless' and 'lazy'.
Based on Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2008. ‘“Realistic Prescriptivism”: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its Campaign of “Good Grammar” and Lexpionage, and the Native Israeli Speakers’' Israel Studies in Language and Society 1.1: 135-154.
LINK: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Realistic_Prescriptivism_Academy.pdf
About the speaker: http://www.zuckermann.org/
Hybridity versus Revivability: The Genesis of the Israeli Language
Where: Room 4418, Main Building, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Russell Square, LONDON, England, SOAS Linguistics Departmental Seminar Series http://www.soas.ac.uk/events/event46685 http://www.hrelp.org/events/seminars/abstracts/zuckermann.pdf When: 21st October 2008, 3pm - 5pm
http://www.hrelp.org/events/seminars/
Hybridity versus Revivability: The Genesis of the Israeli Language
Prof Ghil'ad Zuckermann (University of Queensland)
The aim of this lecture is to suggest that due to the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple causation, the revival of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongue(s). Thus, one should expect revival efforts to result in a language with a hybrid genetic and typological character.
It will be argued that Israeli - a 120 year-old language, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. 'Modern Hebrew' - is simultaneously Afro-Asiatic (Semitic) and Indo-European
(Germanic/Slavonic/Romance): Both Hebrew (an important liturgical and literary language) and Yiddish (the revivalists' mother tongue) act as its 'primary contributors', with numerous other contributors such as Russian and Polish.
Almost all Hebrew revivalists, e.g. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Perelman), were native Yiddish-speakers. But they wished to speak Hebrew with Semitic grammar and pronunciation - like Arabs. However, their attempts (1) to deny their (more recent)
roots in search of Biblical ancientness, (2) negate diasporism and disown the 'weak, persecuted' exilic Jew, and (3) avoid hybridity (as reflected in Slavonized, Romance/Semitic-influenced, Germanic Yiddish itself, which they despised) failed.
Although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the emerging Israeli language often mirrors the very components the revivalists sought to erase. Thus, the
study of Israeli casts light on the dynamics between language and culture in general, and in particular into the role of language as a source of collective self-perception.
Multiple causation is manifested in the Congruence Principle, according to which if a feature exists in more than one contributing language, it is more likely to persist in the
emerging language. This lecture will discuss multiple causation in (1) constituent order, (2) tense system, (3) copula enhancement, (4) calquing, and (5) phono-semantic
matching in Israeli. It will suggest that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. 'Revived' languages are unlikely to
have a single parent.
Generally speaking, whereas most forms of Israeli are Semitic, many of its patterns are European. It will be proposed that (1) Whereas Hebrew was synthetic, Israeli -
following Yiddish etc. - is much more analytic; (2) Israeli is a habere language (cf. Latin habere 'to have', taking the direct object), in stark contrast to Hebrew; (3) European languages sometimes dictate the gender of Israeli coinages; (4) The (hidden) productivity and semantics of the allegedly completely Hebrew system of Israeli verbtemplates are, in fact, often European; (5) In Hebrew there was a polarity-of-gender agreement between nouns and numerals, e.g. 'éser banót 'ten girls' versus 'asar-á baním 'ten (feminine) boys'. In Israeli there is a simpler - European - system, e.g. éser banót 'ten girls', éser baním 'ten boys'; (6) Yiddish has shaped the semantics of the Israeli verbal system in the case of inchoativity; (7) The Israeli proclitics be- 'in', le- 'to' and mi-/me 'from', as well as the coordinating conjunction ve- 'and', are phonologically less dependent than in Hebrew; (8) Word-formation in Israeli abounds with European mechanisms such as portmanteau blending.
Israeli possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the linguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis and
hybridity, social issues like language vis-à-vis politics, and practical matters, e.g. whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language. The multisourced nature of Israeli and the role of the Congruence Principle in its genesis have implications for historical linguistics, language planning and the study of language, culture and identity.
Further reading:
http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf
http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/new-vision.pdf
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Ghil'ad ZUCKERMANN, D.Phil. (Oxford), M.A. (Tel Aviv) (summa cum laude), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has been Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has taught in Singapore, Israel, England and USA; and has held research posts in Bellagio (Italy), Austin (Texas), Melbourne and Tokyo. His publications - in English, Israeli, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese - include the books Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli, a Beautiful Language, Am Oved, 2008). He is currently working on two further books: (1) Language Genesis and Multiple Causation, and (2) Language, Religion and Identity. His website is http://www.zuckermann.org
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