The Germanic, Slavic etc. influences on Hebrew don't make it Indo-European any more than the French and Latin influences on English make it a Romance language.

I'm not Jewish; I don't know about linguoboy though, even so, I knew pretty much all of what linguoboy said. Actually, I have many Jewish friends who don't know the alphabet let alone the current state of Modern Hebrew in Israel.


I may be wrong, but IE languages have a wide range of Syntax VSO, SOV, and SVO all found in IE languages. Besides many Jews didn't speak IE languages but Arabic. I think contact with IE languages change the pronunciation more than anything, especially with letters like resh, tet, and khet. IMO.

Not as far as I know.


Whether something is an Indo-European language or not is, as Talib points out, a question of genetic relationship, not convergence in syntax. Many scholars do consider Western Europe a linguistic area or Sprachbund and many of those who do use Whorf's term "Standard Average European" or SAE to refer to the core set of features, but I've heard Hebrew referred to as "an SAE language with Semitic vocabulary" only from a few and half-jokingly, because that doesn't really wash. For every SAE feature it has (such as absolute tense) there are at least two (e.g. periphrastic perfect, periphrastic passive) that it lacks. It has more in common with Celtic languages, which are decidedly not SAE, than with any languages of Central Europe.

Quick little Hebrew question, then I'll dart out of this thread: does Hebrew use a broken plural like Arabic? Because the broken plural sucks, and it will put me off Hebrew for all time.

Yes, נשים as the plural for אִשָׁה is one example.

Okay, thanks. Hebrew is definitely off my list.

Broken plurals are an Arabic/South Semitic feature. AFAIK, they are completely absent from Hebrew. Hebrew does have ablaut in plural formation, but this is the result of stress shifts associated with the sound plural suffixes.


How can this be a broken plural? It has a sound plural ending (albeit not the expected one based on the singular gender).

Oh, okay, so the internal ablaut is the exception, and not the rule?

I'm confused now. Why is the נ in the plural and not the singular?

Phonological change. The original Semitic root is אנש. When the stressed feminine suffix -āh (originally *-atu) is added, it causes the medial vowel to drop out so there's nothing between /š/ and the preceding /n/, which then assimilates to it, i.e. *`anaš-atu > *`anšāh (lenition, syncope, and apocope) > *`inšāh (Barth's law) > `i:ššāh (assimilation and pretonic lengthening). The plural form must've had a different stress pattern which prevented this from happening. Instead, it was the short initial syllable which got dropped.


The usual way in which this manifests is reduction of the initial syllable. For instance, /da'var/ "word" to /dva'rim/ "words". There are some more complex examples like /'melex/ "king" > /məla'khim/, but (a) they're not especially common and (b) if this is enough to scare you away from Hebrew then, whatever you do, don't look at the verbs!