Australia by indigenous language group

By Ghil’ad Zuckermann

‘I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.’

- John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States

‘Language is power; let us have ours’, wrote Aboriginal politician Aden Ridgeway perspicaciously on 26 November 2009 in the Sydney Morning Herald. But most Australian revival efforts have been unsuccessful because they were not supported by a sound theoretical understanding of how successful language revival works. Decisions about the appropriate target for language maintenance programmes are too often driven by structural linguistics, where the supposed ideal is inter-generational transmission of the language with all its original structural complexity retained.

But as Israeli (a.k.a. Modern Hebrew) demonstrates, some language components are more revivable than others. Words and verbal conjugations, for example, are easier to reclaim than intonation, discourse, associations and connotations. Australian revivalists and Aboriginal leaders should be encouraged to be realistic rather than puristic, and not to chastise English loanwords and pronunciation, for example, within the emergent language.

But why should attempts to revive Aboriginal languages such as Kaurna (spoken in Adelaide) be supported in the first place? Reversing language shift is of great social benefit. Here are two of the reasons. Firstly – and in my view most importantly – a deontological reason (a principle): Aboriginal tongues deserve to be revived for historical and humanistic justice, inter alia addressing inequality. We hear again and again ‘native title rights’ but where is the ‘native tongue title rights’? Is land more important than language and cultural lens? And in case land and language are one entity, then why only claim land without reclaiming language?

Secondly, a utilitarian reason: Revival of sleeping Aboriginal languages can result in personal, educational and economic empowerment, sense of pride and higher self-esteem of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life.

Although they too encountered hostility and animosity, the Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with Australian revivalists. For example: (1) Documentation: extensive – consider, for example, the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah. Jews have been exposed to literary Hebrew throughout the generations, e.g. when praying in the synagogue.

(2) Prestige: Hebrew was considered a prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for instance).

(3) Uniqueness: Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common (Aramaic was not as prominent), whereas there are dozens of ‘sleeping’ Aboriginal languages and it would be hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English. The revival of a single language is much more manageable that that of numerous tongues in varying states of disrepair.

(4) National self-determination: revived Hebrew was aimed to be the language of an envisioned state.

(5) Lack of ownership: Unlike in the case of Aboriginal languages, anybody has the right to speak Hebrew without getting permission from the Jews.

(6) Easy borrowing: Loanwords and foreign words are not considered theft. In fact, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda loved borrowing from Arabic, Aramaic and other Semitic languages.

(7) Lack of place restriction: Hebrew could be and was revived all over the globe – consider Haim Leib Hazan’s coinage mishkafáim ‘glasses’ in 1890 in Grodno.

Applying precious conclusions from Hebrew will closely assist Australian revivalists in being more efficient, urging them not to waste time and resources on Sisyphean efforts to resuscitate linguistic components that are unlikely to be revivable. While the results of such endeavors have considerable value as a research enterprise, one can also consider them in terms of a cost-benefit analysis: Language revitalization contributes to social reconciliation, cultural tourism, capacity building, and improved community health for Indigenous peoples.

The process may be more important here than the actual goal. In the process of language revival, many Aboriginal people will experience a marked increase in well-being and optimism. The benefits to the wider community and to Australian society are immense. Stop, revive, survive!

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (Cambridge), M.A. (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at The University of Queensland, Brisbane. His most recent revolutionary book ‘Israeli – A Beautiful Language’ was published by Am Oved (Tel Aviv) and became a bestseller. His website is www.zuckermann.org .

Prof. Zuckermann will lecture in Adelaide on Wednesday 9 June at 19:30 – at Hines Hall, Adelaide Hebrew Congregation, 13 Flemington Street, Glenside SA 5065; as well as at Limmud Oz Melbourne at Monash Caulfield on Sunday 13 June at 13:15 and on Monday 14 June at 12:00.

The Hebrew Bible should be taught like a foreign language, argues Assoc.

In 1996 President Ezer Weizman visited the University of Cambridge to familiarize himself with the famous collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts known as the Cairo Genizah. He was introduced to the Regius Professor of Hebrew, who had been nominated by the Queen of England herself. Hearing “Hebrew,” the friendly president clapped the don on the shoulder and asked má nishmà, the common Israeli “what’s up?” greeting, which is, in fact, a calque – loan translation – of the Yiddish phrase vos hért zikh, usually pronounced vsértsekh and literally meaning “what’s heard?”

To Weizman’s astonishment, the distinguished Hebrew professor didn’t have the faintest clue whatsoever about what the president “wanted from his life”. As an expert of the Old Testament, he wondered whether Weizman was alluding to Deuteronomy 6:4: “Shemá‘ Yisraél” (Hear, O Israel). Knowing neither Yiddish, Russian (Что слышно chto slyshno), Polish (co sÉychać), nor Romanian (ce se aude) – a fortiori Israeli – the Cantabrigian don had no chance whatsoever of guessing the actual meaning of this beautiful, economical expression.

Semiticist Edward Ullendorff has claimed that Isaiah could have easily understood Israeli. Compared with Ullendorff I am “ul-yamím” (very young) but I propose that his statement is false – unless of course he referred to Isaiah Leibowitz, yet another prophet. To begin with, Isaiah the Biblical would have found it extremely difficult to even decode the European pronunciation of Israeli speakers. But the more important – and much less hypothetical – question is: Do Israelis understand Isaiah?

In the last 10 years, I have sadly and most unfortunately acquired many enemies inter alia because I insisted that Israelis not only do not understand the Bible, but much worse: they misunderstand it without even realising it! By and large, Israeli speakers are the worst students in advanced studies of the Bible. Against this background, I was delighted to hear about the project launched by the impressively-experienced Bible teacher Avraham Ahuvia, as well as the insightful publisher Rafi Mozes, acronymized in the biblionym “Tanakh RAM.”

Israeli, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. “Modern Hebrew,” is a fascinating and multifaceted 120 year-old Semito-European hybrid language. It is mosaic rather than Mosaic tout court. Its grammar is based not only on “sleeping beauty” – or “walking dead” – Hebrew, but simultaneously also on Yiddish, the revivalists’ máme loshn (mother tongue), as well as on a plethora of other languages spoken by the founders of Israeli, e.g. Polish, Russian, German, Ladino and Arabic. Notwithstanding, Israel’s Education Ministry axiomatically assumes that Israeli is simply an organic evolution of Hebrew and that the Bible is thus written in the very same language – albeit in a higher register, of course – spoken by Israeli pupils at primary and secondary schools. Needless to say, the publishers of Hartom-Cassuto, and other volumes providing numerous glosses to the unfathomable Biblical verses, have benefited a lot from such purism prism, which might be somewhat related to self-righteousness, hubris or simply conservatism or blindness on behalf of Israel’s educational system.

The otherwise perspicacious intellectual Avi Ravitzky, whom I have great respect for, wrote in 2000 that “Modern Greek, for example, boasts many similarities to its ancestor, yet a speaker of the current language must struggle to read ancient texts. The modern Hebrew speaker, however, moves smoothly through the Bible”. Leaving aside the crucial difference between the evolution of Classical into Modern Greek and the qualitatively-unparallelable Israeli genesis (rather than evolution), the alleged smoothness is a mere myth. Israelis might understand the most general meaning of “bereshit- bara ’elohim ’et hashamayim we’et ha’arets” (Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth) but very few would be able to explain the construct-state nomen regens (nismákh) bereshít-: in the beginning of what? And how many Israelis could fathom this sentence from the perspective of the temporal sequence of creation: were the heaven and the earth created at the same time? Is it, therefore, possible that the expression ‘the heaven and the earth’ here refers to ‘the world’ in general? And which Israeli-speaker uses a Verb-Subject-Object constituent-order as in ‘created God the heaven and the earth’? Ask Israelis what “’avaním shaħaqú máyim” (Job 14:19) means and they will tell you that the stones eroded the water. On second thought, they might guess that semantically it would make more sense that the water eroded the stones. Yet such an Object-Verb-Subject constituent-order is ungrammatical in Israeli.

How many Israelis can really fathom “tohu wavohu” or “tIhom” (Genesis 1:2), the Israeli misleading senses being “mess” and “abyss” respectively? Or “haşvi yisra’el ‘al bamotekha ħalal” (II Samuel 1:19: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places)? Most Israelis understand “yéled sha‘ashu‘ím” (Jeremiah 31:19, King James 20) as “playboy” rather than “pleasant child”. “Bá’u baním ‘ad mashbér” (Isaiah 37:3) is interpreted by Israelis as “children arrived at a crisis” rather than as “children arrived at the mouth of the womb, to be born”. “’Adam lI‘amal yullad” (Job 5:7) is taken to mean “man was born to do productive work” rather than “mischief” or “trouble” – this sentence stands as an accusation of the inherent wickedness of mankind.

Since I am writing this piece from Bris bane (haBesorim) – cf. “covenant between (the parts)” – let me provide an example from Genesis 15:9: Who knows what “‘egla meshulleshet” is?: a triangular heifer? three calves? a third heifer? a cow weighing three weight units? a three-legged heifer?… If you studied the RAM Bible, you would know because its translation into Israeli is as egla bat shalosh (“an heifer of three years old”, see also the King James Version, which is, obiter dictum, often more accessible to Israelis that the Hebrew Bible itself). And I have been rebuked being told so many times the red herring that if we correct Israelis’ alleged “grammatical mistakes”, they would be more likely to understand Classical Hebrew. Does an Israeli saying “asara shkalim” (10 shekels) have more chances to understand “‘egla meshulleshet” than if he stuck to the actually more commonly grammatical “eser shekel”? Just as the “Jerusalem artichoke” has to do with neither Jerusalem nor artichoke (even though some Jerusalem restaurants take pride in serving it), what Yossi Sarid – to mention but one linguistic right-winger – calls ‘mistaken Hebrew’ is neither mistaken nor Hebrew: it is grammatical Israeli!

Obviously, one could give thousands other examples, and from post-Biblical Hebrew too: for instance, how many Israelis can follow the meaning of the Passover Haggadah or the Hanukkah hymn Ma‘oz Tsur Yeshu‘ati? So is Hebrew menabeaħ ‘blaspheming’ indeed related, after all, to Israeli novéakh ‘barking’?

Most importantly, however, the available examples are far from being only lexical: Israelis are incapable of recognizing moods and aspects in the Bible. For example, “nappíla goralót wened‘á” (Jonah 1:7) was thought by some Israelis I have examined to be rhetorical future rather than cohortative, the latter apparent, for example, in Israeli “yeushar hataktsiv!” (may the budget be approved!).

Despite 11 years of Biblical training, Israeli-speakers still understand the perfect aspect (e.g. ’amar “said” as in “I will have said…”) as if it were past tense. The imperfect aspect (e.g. yomar “would/will say” as in “I thought I would say…”) is misunderstood to be the future tense. In reality, a Biblical verb in the perfect aspect – which Israelis take to be past tense – can refer to a completed action in the future – cf., mutatis mutandis, the Israeli colloquial question “záznu?” (literally, “have we gone/moved?”), utterable instead of “yala bay”, i.e. “let’s go”. I remember my tironut (IDF recruit training) commander ordering us in a sadaút session (“fieldcraft”, etymologically unrelated to sadism): “od khamésh dakót hayítem kan!” (Within five minutes you will have been here), hayítem being in Israeli grammatically past but actually referring in this specific colloquial case to an action in the future. In the Bible, heyitém refers regularly – not only colloquially – to an action that has been completed, regardless of whether or not it is in the past or future – hence the term “aspect” rather than “tense”. Such Biblical mindset is in harsh contradistinction to the Weltanschauung of the Homo sapiens sapiens israelicus vulgaris and to the way Israelis read the Bible.

Negating the Diaspora, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda would have been most content had Israelis spoken Biblical Hebrew. Had the Hebrew revival been fully successful, we would indeed have spoken a language closer to ancient Hebrew than Modern English is to Chaucer because we would have bypassed more than 1,750 years of natural development. On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that Hebrew had never died as a spoken language by the second century CE and it continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews. They eventually returned to the Only Land, continuing to speak Hebrew. It might well be the case that that Hebrew would have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does Israeli, but this fact says nothing about the genetics of actual Israeli.

Given such a magnificent hybridic yíkhes (heritage), as well as the omnipresent misunderstandings of the Hebrew Bible by lovely Israelis, Ahuvia’s translation should be cherished and embraced – rather than chastised – by the establishment. Israel’s Education Ministry should revise the way it teaches the Bible and treat it as foreign language classes – just like Latin, employing the most advanced alternative teaching methods of second language teaching, which can be most joyful and memorable. Such a measure has the potential of reducing Israeli pupils’ disdain for Bible lessons, as well as of attracting more secular Jews to Biblical scholarship. In fact, established and accomplished Biblical scholars would benefit from such a move immensely.

Tanakh RAM fulfills the mission of “red ’el ha‘am” not only in its Hebrew meaning (Go down to the people) but also – more importantly – in its Yiddish meaning (“red” meaning “speak!”, as opposed to its colourful communist sense). Ahuvia’s translation is most useful and dignified. Given its high register, however, I predict that the future promises consequent translations into more colloquial forms of Israeli, a beautifully multi-layered and intricately multi-sourced language, of which to be proud.

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (titular) (Cambridge), M.A. (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at The University of Queensland. His most recent iconoclastic book Israelit Safa Yafa “Israeli – A Beautiful Language. Hebrew as Myth” was published by Am Oved (Tel Aviv) and became a controversial bestseller. His website is www.zuckermann.org . The first Australian Workshop on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (AWAAL), an international conference that he is organizing, will take place in Brisbane on 11-13 September 2009, concurrently with the Brisbane Writers Festival (9-13 September) and  QBE Riverfire (12 September).

The language spoken in today’s Israel is a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle hybrid, based not only on ‘sleeping beauty’ (or alternatively, ‘walking dead’) Hebrew but also on the revivalists’ mother tongues such as Yiddish, argues Assoc. Prof. Ghil‘ad Zuckermann in his recent controversial iconoclastic bestseller Israeli, A Beautiful Language (Am Oved, Tel Aviv, December 2008).

Israeli politician Yossi Sarid and many others clearly cannot free themselves from ‘asara sheqalim (10 shekels) and the other shackles of what I call the ‘purism prism’ or ‘purism prison’. But just as the ‘Jerusalem artichoke’ has to do with neither Jerusalem nor artichoke (even though some Jerusalem restaurants take pride in serving it), what Sarid calls ‘corrupt Hebrew’ is neither corrupt nor Hebrew: it is grammatical Israeli, a beautifully multi-layered and intricately multi-sourced language that one should embrace and celebrate.

Several days before the publication in Tel Aviv of my most recent book by Am Oved Publishing House, I finally received its cover. Ignoring the idiom ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, I looked at it and darkness was made in my eyes: whereas the title of the book was israelit safa yafa, i.e. ISRAELI, A Beautiful Language (challenging and modelled upon the old Zionist slogan ivrit safa yafa ‘Hebrew is a beautiful language’), the last sentence on the back cover was ‘this is his first book in HEBREW’! Worriedly, I called Am Oved and was given an ultimatum: either we leave it as ‘this is his first book in Hebrew’ or change it to ‘this is his first book in Israeli and his last book at Am Oved’!

Eventually, the compromise was ‘this is his first book published in Israel’.

‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, says Juliet to Romeo (or Yael to Ram, as per a fin-de-siècle translation to ’Modern Hebrew’) in a piece by the famous playwright referred to by Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi as ‘Sheikh Zubeir’. There are cases in which the name is extremely important because it determines the way people perceive the thing it stands for. Just as thought influences language, language can shape thought. It was Confucius who said 2,500 years ago that the first thing one has to do is to rectify names!

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (titular) (Cambridge), M.A. (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at The University of Queensland. His most recent book is Israelit Safa Yafa “Israeli – A Beautiful Language. Hebrew as Myth” is published by Am Oved (Tel Aviv).  His website is www.zuckermann.org . The first Australian Workshop on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (AWAAL), an international conference that he is organizing, will take place in Brisbane on 11-13 September 2009, concurrently with the Brisbane Writers Festival (9-13 September) and  QBE Riverfire (12 September).

What lessons could one draw from the Hebrew revival in the Promised Land to current revival attempts of no-longer spoken Aboriginal languages in the Lucky Country? Heaps! While the Hebrew revivalists, who wished to speak pure Hebrew, failed in their purism, it is nevertheless hard to imagine  a more successful revival attempt –  for the following reasons: (1) the remarkable strength of the Jewish revivalists’ motivation, zealousness, Hebrew consciousness, and centuries of ‘next year in Jerusalem’ ideology, (2) the extensive documentation of Hebrew – as opposed to ‘sleeping’ Aboriginal languages, and (3) the fact that Jews from all over the world had only Hebrew in common whereas there are dozens of Aboriginal languages to be revived and it would be hard to choose only one – unless it is Aboriginal English. I propose that the revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). I therefore predict that any attempt to revive an Aboriginal language will result in a hybrid.

That is of course not to say that we should not revive dead languages and cultures. On the contrary! My research on the transition from ancient Hebrew to new Israeli should encourage Aboriginal leaders and revival linguists to be more realistic about their goals, and can share with them crucial linguistic insights about what components of language are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, associations, connotations and semantic networkings.

For example, my research analyses the hitherto-overlooked camouflaged semantic networking being transferred from one language to another. Whereas mechanisms as calques (loan translations such as superman, from German Übermensch), phono-semantic matches (e.g. crayfish, from Old French crevice, a cognate of crab that has little to do with fish) and portmanteau blends (e.g. motel, from motor+hotel) have been studied, there is a need to uncover concealed semantic links between words in the Target Language which reflect – often subconsciously – semantic networking in the Source Language. Consider the Israeli word gakhlilít ‘firefly, glow-worm’ – coined by poet laureate H. N. Bialik (1873-1934). This word is semantically and etymologically linked to the Biblical Hebrew word gaHelet ‘burning coal, glowing ember’. Morphologically, Israeli gakhlilít derives from Hebrew gaHelet plus the reduplication of its third radical [l]. However, no Israeli dictionary reveals the crucial semantic networking aspect, namely that the Israeli concoction, gakhlilít, in fact replicates a European mindset, apparent, for example in Yiddish גליווארעם glivórem ‘firefly’, lit. ‘glow’ (cf. gaHelet) + ‘worm’, or in German Glühwürmchen.

Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. I even have a friend who claimed that he owned a language although he only knew one single word in it, namely its name. Consequently, one could find indigenous Australians who do not find it necessary or important to revive their ’sleeping’/comatose tongue. I, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia’s very own roadside dictum: ‘Stop, revive, survive!‘

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (titular) (Cambridge), M.A. (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at The University of Queensland. His most recent iconoclastic book Israelit Safa Yafa “Israeli – A Beautiful Language. Hebrew as Myth” was published by Am Oved (Tel Aviv) and became a controversial bestseller. His website is www.zuckermann.org .

The first Australian Workshop on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (AWAAL), an international conference that Ghil‘ad is organizing, will take place in Brisbane on 11-13 September 2009, concurrently with the Brisbane Writers Festival (9-13 September) and QBE Riverfire (12 September).