Elicitation of words and phrases in Hebrew

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Introduction:

Today the Hebrew language has developed into a modernized version of itself compared to its ancient biblical roots. The Hebrew language is considered one of the Semitic branchs of the Afro-Asiatic family (Frost, 2006). It was first emerged around the late 11th or early 10th century BCE and took the form of the Gezer calendar. The script is named Old Hebrew; it is hardly perceptible from the Phoenician from where it mainly originated (Green, 2004). Hebrew is said to be the dominant official language of Israel, along with Arabic and English (Frost, 2006). There are nearly five million people who speak Hebrew in Israel. As any other language, Hebrew has two main dialects: the Europeanized dialect that is spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of European descent and is strongly influenced by Yiddish and the Oriental dialect that is spoken by the Sephardi Jews whose ancestors came from Middle Eastern countries.

The Hebrew language lacked many words that were needed to relate to the modern world because it was not spoken for centuries; as a result, many new words had to be added. Modern Hebrew words were created from existing roots, the meaning of existing words was expanded to deal with new emerging concepts, and a large number of words were borrowed from other languages, such as Arabic, Yiddish, German, Russian, and other European languages to make the Hebrew language more complete and versatile. Although not dominant in Western countries, Hebrew is spoken by nearly all of the 7.3 million people in Israel as either a first or second language. As one can see, the ever-expanding language is more dominant in the Middle East.

The Hebrew spoken language has evolved over ...

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