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The revival process of the Hebrew language took place in Europe and Palestine toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, through which the language's usage changed from the sacred language of Judaism to a spoken and written language used for daily life in Israel. The process began as Jews started arriving in Palestine in the first half of the nineteenth century and used Hebrew as a lingua franca.〔Parfitt , Tudor (1972) 'The Use of Hebrew in Palestine 1800–1822.' Journal of Semitic Studies, 17 (2). pp. 237-252.〕 However, a parallel development in Europe changed Hebrew from primarily a sacred liturgical language into a literary language〔Parfitt, Tudor (1983) 'Ahad Ha-Am's Role in the Revival and Development of Hebrew.' In: Kornberg, J., (ed.), At the crossroads: essays on Ahad Ha-am. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 12-27.〕 which played a key role in the development of nationalist educational programs.〔Parfitt, Tudor (1995) 'Peretz Smolenskin, the Revival of Hebrew and Jewish Education.' In: Abramson, G. and Parfitt , T., (eds.), Jewish education and learning : published in honour of Dr. David Patterson on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 1-11.〕 Modern Hebrew, along with Modern Arabic, has been an official language in Israel since the British Mandate of Palestine, a situation that continued after the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948. More than purely a linguistic process, the revival of Hebrew was utilized by Jewish modernization and political movements, and became a tenet of the ideology associated with settlement of the land, Zionism〔Paul Johnson, ''A History of the Jews'', p.442. " Yet in all (young David Ben-Gurion's ) activity, three salient principles remained constant. First, Jews must make it their priority to return to the land; ‘the settlement of the land is the only true Zionism, all else being self-deception, empty verbiage and merely a pastime’. (in Encyclopaedia Judaica, iv 506. ) Second, the structure of the new community must be designed to assist this process within a socialist framework. Third, the cultural binding of the Zionist society must be the Hebrew language.〕 and Israeli policy. The process of Hebrew's return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language without any native speakers subsequently acquiring several million such native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of "first language" speakers. The language's revival eventually brought linguistic additions with it. While the initial leaders of the process insisted they were only continuing "from the place where Hebrew's vitality was ended", what was created represented a broader basis of language acceptance; it includes characteristics derived from all periods of Hebrew language, as well as from the non-Hebrew languages used by the long-established European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, with Yiddish (the European variant) being predominant. == Background == (詳細はSecond Temple period (lasting to c. 70 CE), after which the language developed into Mishnaic Hebrew. (From about the 6th century BCE until the Middle Ages, many Jews spoke the related Semitic Aramaic language.) From the 2nd century CE until the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language ''circa'' 1880, Hebrew was employed as a literary and official language and the language of prayer.〔''A Short History of the Hebrew Language,'' Chaim Rabin, Jewish Agency and Alpha Press, Jerusalem, 1973〕 Ever since the spoken usage of Mishnaic Hebrew ended in the 2nd century CE, Hebrew had not been spoken as a mother tongue. Even so, during the Middle Ages, the language was used by Jews in a wide variety of disciplines. This usage kept alive a substantial portion of the traits characteristic of Hebrew. First and foremost, Classical Hebrew was preserved in full through well-recognized sources, chiefly the Tanakh (especially those portions used liturgically like the Torah, Haftarot, Megilot, and the Book of Psalms) and the Mishnah. Apart from these, Hebrew was known through hymns, prayers, midrashim, and the like. During the Middle Ages, Hebrew was used as a written language in Rabbinical literature, including in judgments of Halakha, Responsa, and books of meditation. In most cases, certainly in the base of Hebrew's revival, 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the use of Hebrew was not at all natural, but heavy in flowery language and quotations, non-grammatical forms, and mixing-in of other languages, especially Aramaic. Hebrew was used not only in written form but also as an articulated language, in synagogues and in batei midrash. Thus, Hebrew phonology and the pronunciation of vowels and consonants were preserved. Despite this, in the region the influence of foreign tongues caused many changes, leading to the development of different forms of pronunciation: * Ashkenazi Hebrew, used by Eastern and Western European Jews, which maintained mostly the structure of vowels but may have moved the stress and lost the gemination, although this cannot be known for sure, as there are no recordings of how the language (or its respective dialects) sounded e.g. in Kana'an; Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation has a variation of vowels and consonants, which follows closely the variation of the vowel and consonant signs written down by the masoretes around the 7th century CE, indicating that there is a strong link with the language heard by them. E.g. where we see two different vowel signs, or a consonant with resp. without a dogeish (dagesh), a difference is also heard in the various Ashkenazic pronunciations. * Sephardi Hebrew, used by Sephardi Jews, preserved a structure different from the recognized Tiberian Hebrew niqqud of only five vowels, but did preserve the consonants, the grammatical stress, the dagesh, and the schwa; yet, different ways of writing consonants are not always heard in all Sephardic pronunciations. E.g. the Dutch Sephardic pronunciation does not make a difference between the beth with and without dagesh: both are pronounced as "b". The "taf" is always pronounced as "t", with or without dagesh. There are two possibilities: the difference disappeared over time in the Sephardic pronunciations, or it never was there in the first place: the pronunciation stems from a separate Hebrew dialect, which always was there, and which e.g. the masoretes did not use as reference. * Yemenite Hebrew, which, thought by some to preserve much of the Classical Hebrew pronunciation, was barely known when the revival took place. * Within each of these groups, there also existed different subsets of pronunciation. For example, differences existed between the Hebrew used by Polish Jewry and that of Lithuanian Jewry and of German Jewry. In the fifty years preceding the start of the revival process, a version of spoken Hebrew already existed in the markets of Jerusalem. The Sephardic Jews who spoke Ladino or Arabic and the Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Yiddish needed a common language for commercial purposes. The most obvious choice was Hebrew. Although Hebrew was spoken in this case, it was not a native mother tongue, but more of a pidgin. The linguistic situation against which the background the revival process occurred was one of diglossia, when two languages—one of prestige and class and another of the masses—exist within one culture. In Europe, this phenomenon has waned, starting with English in the 16th century, but there were still differences between spoken street language and written language. For example, Russians spoke popular Russian to each other, but wrote in a more literary style of Russian or French, while Germans spoke in local dialects and wrote in Standard German. Likewise, Arabs spoke locally-specific forms of Colloquial Arabic, but writing was (and still is) done in Standard Arabic. In Europe, the situation mirrored that of the general population, but with Yiddish as the spoken language, the language of the broader culture (depending on the country) used for secular speech and writing, and Hebrew for liturgical purposes. In the Arab Middle East, Ladino and Colloquial Arabic were the spoken languages most prevalent in Jewish communities (with Ladino more prevalent in the Mediterranean and Arabic, Aramaic, Kurdish, and Persian more widely spoken by Jews in the East), while Classical Arabic was used for secular writing, and Hebrew used for religious purposes (though some Jewish scholars from the Arab world, such as Maimonedes, wrote primarily in Arabic). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Revival of the Hebrew language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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