Re: Hebrew and Conlangs

Wesley Parish wrote:

> HI.
Hi!

> I've just read some parts of a monograph called:
>
> "The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew:
> A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past"
I've read it in the past, but I'm afraid it's been a while since
I've read it, but I remember the gist of the argument.

> the thing that interested me, was that if his thesis was accurate, Ivrit/Modern
> Hebrew would then be the world's first conlang to achieve the status of an
> official spoken language.
I believe Ivar Aasen's Nynorsk is already first (though I may have
my chronology wrong).  I believe that what he - a self-taught,
amateur linguist - did was no different than what we do when we work
with a posteriori languages, except he had a different purpose in
mind.  But I agree with you that Modern Hebrew must be a conlang of
sorts too, and I certainly admire Eliezar Ben Yehuda; if I recall
correctly he was also an amateur linguist but I may be wrong.  I
might have "created" modern Hebrew differently, but what he started
and others contributed to certainly works and it achieved the
purpose of giving a single language to a diverse community of people
(not trying to get in to a discussion of the merits or de-merits of
auxlangs and I believe - rightly or wrongly - that Nynorsk and
Modern Hebrew are fundamentally different from an interlang or
auxlang with totally separate design goals).

(And to those who speak Nynorsk or Modern Hebrew this certainly
isn't a put-down: I think it's cool!)

I don't think I would say that Modern Hebrew _simply_ is re-lexified
Yiddish, but one cannot underestmate the impact that Yiddish had on
the evolution of Modern Hebrew, given that many of its first
speakers were of Yiddish or Germanic linguistic background.  This
would _have_ to have an impact.  It's as if I tried to create a
"modern Gaulish" for a group of people who have been speaking French
for a few hundred years - you can bet that my "modern Gaulish" would
become heavily influenced by the speech habits of French speakers.

> (Donning flameproof underware)
Do you know where I can get a set of those asbestos underpants?

Shalom aleichem,
Eamon

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