Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?

Helmut Richter wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > Wexler says that Modern Hebrew is "relexified Yiddish," and he has a
> > point -- because Modern Hebrew grammar bears very little relation to
> > Biblical Hebrew grammar and is very similar to "Standard Average
> > European" grammar, which is reasonable because Hebrew was revived as a
> > spoken language by people whose native language was Yiddish.
>
> I understand the point but I feel it is grossly exaggerated. A Modern
> Hebrew speaker has no problems reading the Bible, and if he once and

They could _read_ TaNaKh, but they couldn't _write_ it or speak its
language.

> for all has learnt that what mitaking aspects as tenses can yield
> unexpected meanings in some contexts (and surprisingly, statistically
> only in few contexts because the most frequent BH form does not exist
> in MH and thus cannot cause misunderstandings), he will understand
> everything correctly. One afternoon of BH lessons might well be enough
> to learn the different tense system and the somewhat different SOV
> word order.

SOV??

> > They
> > assiduously learned Hebrew vocabulary, but they were not equipped to
> > take on a very alien syntax, including a tense-aspect system totally
> > different from what they were used to.
>
> Would such a shift in grammar (an aspect system with some tense
> flavour becoming a tense system with a little aspect flavour) be
> absolutely inconceivable, had the language gradually evolved over the
> last 2000 years instead of being reanimated or reinvented?

Of course not. And it _did_ happen. The people who continued to write in
Hebrew for centuries after no one spoke it any more naturally wrote it
with more and more of their native syntaxes. Just as 19th-century Latin
bears little syntactic relationship to Cicero's Latin.

And IH is most definitely very unlike BH.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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