Languages of the Jewish People 

ha

too bad I can't upvote comments on my phone (lmao wth is up with that anyway)

+Sushininja127 you belong to THE TOP

+Sushininja127 This took a bit longer

true

+Vadim .S. Ancient Hebrew is different than Modern Hebrew

shamos shamos nobody said it wasn't

+Burhan the Somali to some extent yes, but more than half of Israel's Jews originate from non-European countries (mostly arabic speaking countries like Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia)

Modern Hebrew pronounciation sounds quite the same as the plain old Sephardic Hebrew, with the exception of ĥet (now sounds like chaf), 'ayin (now sounds like alef), quf (now sounds like kaf) and șadi (this was the ashkenazi innovation, now sounds "ts"). By some, also silencing the he.

Yiddish is a germanic

+Ronbugy9 Sounds like it would make a great part 2.

I am from Bukhara and i would say that jewish bukhari it's not too different from just Bukharian Persian, they just got some specific accent

There are also Crimean Jews who spoke Judeo-Tatar.

@vaguelyhuman they dont. they speak regular amharic.

​@@Kurtlane interesting. I just looked it up. Its new to me. Ive never heard of Krymchak. Ive lived in Israel and in New York and never heard of it.

@ΤηεΒεστ ΟφΜε Pitty I can't put a comment in my favs man.. 😭

@@renon4491 free palpatine

i know i'm 7 years late but i'm pretty sure it's an optical illusion, i tried comparing the 2 shades and they were exactly the same

THEY'RE LITERALLY THE EXACT SAME COLOR!

+amichair it's because jews always used hebrew bibles while the languages of the Italian bible changed

Old Latin?? Nobody understands that. That's different from Latin.

Well duh, Hebrew is Hebrew but Italian isn't Latin

amichair in fact Italian isn't even the closest language to old Latin,that would be Sardinian.

TheSuomi he was addressing xidnaf’s point in the video.

+NB box rotse shekel?

+REALhacksDAILY barur. mi lo?

Oh, that's really nice. Did you receive some kind of education about Ancient Hebrew and/or the Bible?

+Baptiste Loreau Yes, I learn the Bible 5 hours a week

+Baptiste Loreau In Israel Bible Studies are MANDATORY in almost all primarily Jewish schools. Nearly every jewish-Israeli citizen has therefore studied and has basic understanding of the hebrew bible. That's why I commented "Rotse Shekel" = "want a shekel", which is a common expression meaning "so what", since this is really not an accomplishment - In contrast to say an American reaching that level of understanding, which means he or she has gone out of their way to understand this often confusing language.

+Beni Habibi huh. I thought Persian Jews spoke Judeo-Aramaic. Interesting.

+Tom Tyler It can have too many names according to people's perspective

+Beni Habibi - A modern version of this, or the real thing from 30 centuries ago? I didn't think they even knew how those languages were pronounced for sure, or what usages and idioms would have sounded "correct" to contemporary ears, given only limited text samples are extant and these in formal styles probably different from everyday speech. Wish we could go back in a time machine and make sound recordings.

Verner Hornung as a historian, I agree whole heartedly.

Beni Habibi He should've taught you so the language could stay alive

They also banned using Yiddish

***** en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Scottish_Gaelic_origin www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/cananan/beurla/faclan.html

FlatScreenNinja English would have a much higher influence on celtic languages than the other way around.Celtic languages have given way to english ,because the english are the dominant nation in the irish and british isles Whereas as england has not been dominated by celtic speaking peoples,but was dominated by french speaking normans which is why there is so many french words in english

+Bruce Wilson his point still stands, what little influence the brittonic and goidelic languages had on English was minimal and restricted to terms Germanic settlers never encountered before. Indian languages have had probably sixfold the impact on English despite interacting with them a 10th of the time the Celts have. perhaps a better video would be on why the Celts DIDN'T have such an impact (bringing in Anglo-Saxon apartheid theory, genocide theory, cultural dominance theory etc...)

FlatScreenNinja 69th like

@@tchorveiik Some dialects are *very* strongly influenced grammatically by the Celtic languages. Most West Country dialects have definite influence from the Cornish language, and many of the stronger southern US dialects are grammatically strongly influenced by Scotch-Irish and Irish immigrants (especially Appalachian and--interestingly--Ebonics/AAVE)

No they are not similar simply because Hebrew as a language went extinct amd modern Hebrew was created synthetically, as noboda actually had any idea how words and letters are actually pronaunced.

But there was a different alphabet

@@panzerbanz7296 Everyone does actually how it was pronounced. Linguists have extensive knowledge of the sounds of the ancient Hebrew because of reconstruction of other Canaanite languages, and mostly just looking into Yemeni Hebrew. I'd say a 10 year old kid can't communicate people 5000 years ago, but someone with a bit of knowledge in written Hebrew can with just a bit of thinking.

bruh 5000 years ago? the earliest you could claim anything resembling hebrew exists in 3000, and only becomes biblical style hebrew 2600-ish during the kingdoms period before the first exile apart from that, i agree

@@panzerbanz7296 it was extinct as a native language but not as a sacred language.

U’re a disgusting colonialist, and your none country doesn’t have right to exist and anyone who support it deserve to riot in hell.

Palestinian filth Take your own life.

It would be as intelligible as English speakers reading Shakespeare no?

@@screamtoasigh9984 Hebrew is a lot older though

@@screamtoasigh9984 The only big thing that is different is the vocabulary

@the baron Modern hebrew lent a lot of bibilical expressions and proverbs though , a lot of those proverbs contain Aramaic words , so israelis know some Aramaic words too

But I don't think modern hebrew speakers would be able to speak biblical hebrew

檀 杏斗 - It's even more awesome that you speak English. Your language looks cool but impossible to read.

Metal Gear It's Chinese...

檀 杏斗 Why not the pre Coptic, Egyptian language?

tardistardis8 - Im assuming all the Asian languages use the same characters just like the ABCs of English are the same for French, Spanish, Russian, German & so forth. Idk.

Seeking Truth Coptic is the final stage of the Egyptian language before it was replaced by Arabic.

Love a more permanent fact or object

I noticed a handful so far

No! Really?

+Blu Hiubatto A long time ago :P

How can you "sound" like a brony? I guess he has enough language knowledge to choose any dialect and accent as he would like to speak with. But I did not even know that a brony dialect would even exist.

Tim Jadeglans it's not how he sounds he referenced itm

Some bronies sometimes speak in the Equestrian dialect

Nooze Arts Thanks, I hope your prophecy is right!

@@Xidnaf 😳

+CulusMagnus Deus vult.

It's still spoken. My college offers intro to Latin. It just that Latin isn't really useful anywhere, even the Vatican mostly uses Italian as a means of communicating.

***** Latin is still spoken but it's dead anyway. It has 0 native speakers, just like Hebrew before Israel came along. People speaks Latin for religious and academic reasons, but not much else.

Mateo Pedro Gonzale de Azcuenaga and as hobbyists :)

+CulusMagnus Isn't the main problem that no one knows how Latin was pronounced? That seems to be a problem with dead languages in general. I've looked a bit into Gothic. The problem their seems to be twofold; the other problem is that in addition to having to guess about pronunciations is that most of the vocabulary had to be reconstructed.

savioursmesmerized Roman language? Do you mean Romance language?

savioursmesmerized honey, believe me, even though Romanian is officially a romance language, it is the most slavic romance language. There are many words in romanian that are slavic in origin. And Moldavian is a real thing. They use romanian words in a Russian way. For example, they "watch" a movie, as opposed to Romanian, where they "see" a movie or use archaic Romanian words instead of modern ones, simply because they are translated from Russian.

Kate the 5th Moldavian isn't separate from Romanian. It is considered a dialect of Romanian, but its only called Moldovan in the country of Moldova and even it gets called Moldovan outside of Moldova it is still considered just a dialect of Romanian. However you do make a point as Romanian is the most Slavic of the Romance languages.

savioursmesmerized Being Netherlandish, I can say that it’s called Kayaffsi, Fart, or Xidnafian.

Romanian is the fusion of romance with Slavic...

Actually some of the grammar is different too.

well yeah but its still kinda hard to read

idk why you named chet tav dalet and ayin weirdly but yeah that's fairly accurate; ת merged with ט, and ח with כ, whereas hard and soft ד just merged together and א and ע were lost completely

Actually in some constructions in modern Hebrew - namely passive ones and ones expressing the verb 'to have' in the past and future tenses (which doesn't exist as an actual verb in Hebrew), VSO is still quite a common sentence structure

The kingdom of Judea (Yehuda) is named so in the Bible. Yehud Medinata was the name of the autonomous province during Shivat Zion.

Frankly, I don't know, but it doesn't matter. Judea is how it is called today.

Poland was basically a safe haven in comparison to other European principalities, so although Jews were kicked out from other regions in Europe, they weren't *forced* to settle in Poland, so the word deported is not very fitting I believe.

I didn't see where Poland were specifically mentioned, but Jews were deported from Germany to Eastern Europe and Russia. It's a fact. It means that they were forced to leave their homes and settle in another area, which included Poland.

They were deported from the various Central European principalities they were in, but they weren't deported into Eastern Europe *per se*, it simply was a preferable destination for Jews because of Poland's more tolerant policies towards them in comparison to other regions in Europe

+John Do Wait what? Judea was only the part of Israel where Jerusalem is located, Israel also included other regions like Samaria or Galilea (dunno how Galilea is written sry)

The ancient accent is sound like the yemenite accent

+Violetta Schmieder Again, Judea and Israel were separated kingdoms. This is the best map I could find: www.bibleodyssey.org/en/tools/map-gallery/i/~/media/189EBA522A7044E8BF52780A34F45E14.ashx

+DonMrLenny Not really. The Yemenite accent is very unique and is originated from Yemenite Arabic that is NOT similar to any Arab accent where Israel of today is located.

+John Do He said the *syntax* of Modern Hebrew is similar to Yiddish, not the *lexicon*.

Might happen to the German language too, not during my lifetime though. My father never learned English at school. It was mandatory for me from 5th grade until graduation. It was mandatory for my children from 3rd grade until graduation. Now students start at first grade and go on all the way until graduation and there are voices it should be taught from the day the start kindergarten (which in some countries is called preschool). The are even kindergarten where English is first language now in larger cities already. I see the day coming when English will become first language and German will be taught as second language and even become optional at some point.

That's true! Portuguese is my first language and we can understand galician with practically no effort at all :)

I'm Assyrian and I speak Aramaic. There are still 3-4 million people world wide that speak Aramaic

***** That's great to hear, I assumed there were much fewer speakers.

Galician is just Portuguese heavily influenced by Spanish m80. Even the current way of writing it forgets some native portuguese phonemes just to make it more similar to Spanish.

And with some grammar simplifications too. But yes, basically.

Nah

STFU Yiddish rules Zay mir gezint

יידיש אין דיין תחת

I'm not jewish (: D) ... I speak English! (: D)

@@pischpilot I speak Hebrew and I'm not learning Yiddish. What would I use Yiddish for?

Benjie Leshansky Yeah, he was the main "resurrector" of the Hebrew language.

TellThe Truth! It has very much in common with biblical hebrew. I wouldn't call it "an invention".

TellThe Truth! it's like saying that Shakespeare made a new language and didn't evolved the English language

TellThe Truth! it's like saying that Shakespeare made a new language and didn't evolved the English language

***** Actually, a lot of the vocabulary is from old Hebrew, he only invented words for things like trains, cars and other things that didn't exist in old Hebrew. The grammar is very much the same as old Hebrew dialects, with a few simplifications.

+trebacca9 (\ :)

+Xidnaf .i ambigu /) :D

Joe Mattock He probably spoke Aramaic natively. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_Jesus

Levent M. IM BASQUE WOOT, but i cant speak it, cuz its really hard lol

No biggie, you can learn it ! I'm a Crimean Tatar living in Romania, and i also plan to relearn my language some day :D. Anyway Basque is said to derive from Paleolithic times and i was really curious about Xidnaf's opinions on this controversial laguage.

Levent M. O thats so cool that you're tatar! Unfortunately for me lots of my lineage has difficult languages. I speak spanish, which is my moms first langauge, and obviously english aswell. But then there's Basque, and FINNISH which are both difficult, but Norwegian is easy. So that's why im working on Norwegian currently.

+Levent M. It also has a lot of loanwords from Spanish after years of interaction.

Burhan the Somali essalamualaikum, yeah! That's another reason why im learning it haha

Linguistically speaking the Torah that everyone uses today is very different to what was penned down thousands of years ago, it had to adapt not only to Suit a more "European" tongue, but also had to adapt to suit political factions in Europe. Many stories were slightly changed in order to avoid conflict.

***** The original pronounciation from what I hear is very different in the Torah today than modern Hebrew. Also, Isnt our current version of the Torah just a last rework of the Babylonian Torah?

CeoLogJM Not really, the Torah was modified several times over the ages for various reasons, one of them would be to be politically relevant. The Torah we read today as Jews Christians and Muslims is very different to what what was written down in babylon. That being said, the New Testament has gone under far more revisions then the torah.

***** thanks for the clarifiaction !

I learned some ancient Hebrew, and I can also understand modern hebrew !

Edit: before you read, sorry for the long-ass response, I got carried away. Also, I guess I just made a necropost, didn't see you wrote that three years ago. Katharevousa didn't really utterly fail and you'd be surprised with the impact it has left in Greek. First of all, Katharevousa wasn't the government's doing, but it was created by scholars, and specifically by Αδαμάντιος Κοραής. His main attempt wasn't to exactly revive ancient Greek, but to strengthen the national identity of the Greeks who were still under Ottoman rule. He did this by "borrowing" words from ancient Greek and replacing loans with them. The Demotiki we speak today, despite what many believe, isn't the pure form of the Demotic Greek people of the 19th century used to speak. Many grammar forms and words have been absorbed from the Katharevousa (εστιατόριο for example, didn't exist in pure Demotic, put it came from Katharevousa. Another example, many medical and financial terms, if not all of them, come from Katharevousa trying to use native words instead of directly borrowing). On the other side, the Demotiki one, there were attempts like regularising the grammar by die-hard Demoticists; for example, they wanted φως to become φώτο, and decline similarly to δώρο. Those didn't become a thing in modern Greek, as there are still plenty of irregular grammar patterns (honestly, there might be more irregular than regular forms, haha) Around the 80s-90s, the Greek government (that's where it was involved) decided to merge both Katharevousa and Demotic Greek into one, the Νεοελληνική Γλώσσα, which got rid of the extremities from both versions of the language. This is what we speak today. Not Katharevousa nor Demotic Greek, but it is clear both have left a huge impact on our language, in their own ways.

so do Persian Jews themselves, although, obviously, it's closer to actual Parsi.

not exactly it has a lot of Semitic vocabulary from Aramaic and Hebrew

Yeah, reviving Latin would be cool.

How about if Proto-Indo-European was revived

That's just italian

@@muhtesemsiyanur Latin is still alive and spoken by 60 million, it's just called Italian nowadays

yeah it could work quite well as a lingua franca in europe, but it would need to be simplified and developed quite a bit to fit into the modern contect

אני בוכרי מלאה וזאת הפעם הראשונה נראה לי ששמעתי את זה 👼⁦🇮🇱⁩👼😄

Yea, as a Jewish non-bukkharian queens resident myself I also find it quite interesting. I have heard that the language is very similar to Persian as they were ruled by Persians at one point, although the words are pronounced differently, with more of a Russian sounding accent.

*Seinfeld Theme plays*

Mike Silverknight I shouldn't have, but that genuinely made me laugh.

TheSliderBy I'm Jewish, and I actually laughed out loud at this.

@@dorkmax7073 I'm Jewish and I thought it was funny so laugh away ;)

I am 69th like

Tigrinya and Amharic also languages Jewish people speak. Tigrinya and Ge'ez are closer to classic Hebrew. Ge'ez was used translate classical hebrew into modern as well.

+draghici alex The wikipedia article on "Moldovan language" tells of the history of disagreements about Moldovan as a language or not.

And either way, it's a Romance language

Voievod I believe he’s referring to the now extinct ancestor language of Romanian. The one that contributed the Slavic influence to the Vulgar Latin in the area.

@@jonispatented Nah. Moldovan is another name for Romanian, a romantic language. It is more Slavic than Romanian due to being isolated from Romania itself, but its still nore romantic than Slavic. So idk why he referenced it as a slavic language...either way though, at least its a language 😐

Derek Wagher was afraid that was it, just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Oh well.

This is actually incorrect. Even after 135 there were centers of Judean study under the Roman occupation and into the Byzantine Empire. Synagogues from the Byzantine period and the early Arabic occupation are still being uncovered. As the country became more and more eroded and derelict under Muslim rule, especially during the Ottoman occupation, most inhabitants left. But even then, there were Jews in Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberius and in some rural communities. New Jewish repatriation to Israel began in the 18th and especially the late 19th century, picking up in the early 20th century, and more after WW1 and the creation of the various British and French Mandates in the Levant. Palestine, by the ea

@@knowhere60 my man answering a 7yo comment

He was modern Hebrew is more similar to Yiddish “grammatically”.

:D I was really worried I'd say something wrong or offensive too, especially after your last comment. That you liked it so much is just awesome! And yeah, in hindsight I probably should have briefly mentioned those languages. This video is my longest yet, though, and I was mostly thinking about how to cut stuff from it to make it shorter. Anyway, I'm really glad you liked it!

Xidnaf Maybe you can do a Semitic Languages, part 2 (or 3?) wherein you talk about the other semitic languages, such as Arabic, Amharic, Ge'ez, etc.

David Watson I completely agree. Especially for Amharic and Ge'ez. I see a lot of stuff about Arabic, but seeing it again wouldn't be a bad thing.

1. Crying doesn't make someone weak. 2. I'm not afraid of being offended; I'm afraid of misinformation. 3. You're using name-calling and misinterpreting a comment that clearly states its purpose, and you're telling me to grow up. Your comment didn't add anything to the conversation. It just attacks the author.

I said this in another comment you obviously didn't read. It's not that I was afraid of being offended; I was afraid of misinformation. If someone teaches others something incorrect, that misinformation will continue. Often, it gets too big. For example, how a lot of people believe that Cristopher Columbus proved that the Earth was round when others thought it was flat. It's wrong, but too many people believe it because of a book written hundreds of years ago. I can handle another point of view, but I can't handle lies (not that xidnaf would've done that on purpose).

Mardiff V. Yes

Well, what about non-Arab Middle Eastern countries, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Georgian Jews?

North African Jews are a mix of Sephardim and Mizrahim (and even Ashkenazim in Egypt), they are not all Sephardic.

I thought the same thing

+Teodor Grama (Teo) Romanian is also a Romance language, so that reference to "Moldovan" is incorrect.

Yeah, yiddish is basically a German dialect influenced by slavic langurs, hebrew and aramaic.

hebrew is very different from english, german, or yiddish (the three of which are very similar)

perakole Why can’t they be Serbs if they speak Bulgarian?

+Sword Knight What I mean when I call something a "Jewish language" is just "a language that is important to Jewish history or culture, especially one historically used by Jews." I see no reason that can't overlap with middle eastern languages, particularly since the Jewish ethnicity originated in the middle east.

Xidnaf Fair enough. Just made it sound like you were saying it's inherently Jewish.

+Sword Knight You could also interpret that to mean that they are both Semitic languages (which doesn't have anything to do with Judaism inherently, though one might assume so since Jewish discrimination is called anti-semitism). Arabic is also part of the Semitic language family.

Blake Hahn they are Semitic languages. I already know this.

Blake Hahn it's called anti-Semitism because in the original books/pamphlets, Semitic and Jewish were used pretty interchangeably, plus anti-Jewish group called themselves: Antisemiten-Liga, League of Antisemites. One of the few times Wikipedia is actually factual & sans bias: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism . Google Ngram is useful, you can search word usage throughout books, I think, from today then back until 17th century.

+Emil Sørensen But even I took three more seconds to catch Serbain and Coratian.