Is Hebrew similar to Arabic?
Guttural R
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar tap , similar to Arabic '. Gradually, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative , a sound similar or (depending on the Arabic dialect) identical to Arabic '. However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music an alveolar rhotic continues to be used.
Iturea
Smith's Bible Dictionary attempted to equate the modern Arabic region name "Jedur" (جدور) with both Jetur and Iturea however the Arabic "j" (ج) corresponds to Hebrew "g" (ג) and not "y" (י), and Arabic "d" (د) does not correspond to Hebrew "ṭ" (ט) or Greek "t" (τ) and the mainstream view is that Jedur is instead the Biblical Gedor (גדור).
Yemenite Hebrew
Among the dialects of Hebrew preserved into modern times, Yemenite Hebrew is regarded as one of the forms that retains very many features of Hebrew as used in ancient times, particularly Tiberian Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. This perception is motivated in part by the fact that Yemenite Hebrew preserves many consonant sounds represented by individual letters in the Hebrew alphabet that have been lost elsewhere - except for "sāmeḵ" () and "śīn" (), which are both pronounced , but which had already merged in ancient times, as evident in the spelling variants in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Modern Hebrew
The word order of Modern Hebrew is predominately SVO (subject–verb–object). Biblical Hebrew was originally verb–subject–object (VSO), but drifted into SVO. Modern Hebrew maintains classical syntactic properties associated with VSO languages—it is prepositional rather than postpositional in making case and adverbial relations, auxiliary verbs precede main verbs; main verbs precede their complements, and noun modifiers (adjectives, determiners other than the definite article , and noun adjuncts) follow the head noun, hence in genitive constructions the possessee noun precedes the possessor. Moreover, Modern Hebrew allows and in cases requires sentences with a predicate initial.
Languages of Israel
Although English does not enjoy the same status as Hebrew and Arabic do, English proficiency is a core requirement in the public education system and road signs are generally written in English after Hebrew and Arabic. English is taught in public schools from the third grade to high school, and passing an English oral and written test is a prerequisite for receiving a "Bagrut" (matriculation certificate). Most universities also regard a high level of English as a prerequisite for admission. Exposure to American culture has been massive in Israel since the early 1990s, and in Israel, foreign language television shows are generally presented in the original language with Hebrew subtitles rather than dubbed, which means that there is a high level of exposure to English in the media. 
Most Israelis can converse in and read English on at least a basic level, and secular Israelis who are of a high social and economic status usually possess greater capabilities in English than those who are of a lower social and economic status (this is mostly due to differing levels of state-sponsored education, as well as variation in cultural exposure to the language). Israelis born from the 1980s onward generally have better English language skills than their parents and grandparents due to growing up with a higher level of exposure to the language in the media. Proper usage of the English language is considered a mark of good education among Israelis. In the past, several politicians, including David Levy and Amir Peretz, were mocked openly in the media and in public for their poor English skills.
Hebrew Braille
Hebrew Braille () is the braille alphabet for Hebrew. The International Hebrew Braille Code is widely used. It was devised in the 1930s and completed in 1944. It is based on international norms, with additional letters devised to accommodate differences between English Braille and the Hebrew alphabet. Unlike Hebrew, but in keeping with other braille alphabets, Hebrew Braille is read from left to right instead of right to left., and unlike English Braille, it is a Abjad, all consonants.
Moab
Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, which is the only known extensive text in this language. In addition there are the three line El-Kerak Inscription and a few seals. The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a plural in "-în" rather than "-îm" (e.g. "mlkn" "kings" for Biblical Hebrew "məlākîm"), like Aramaic and Arabic; retention of the feminine ending "-at" or "-ah" which Biblical Hebrew reduces to "-āh" only (e.g. "qiryat" or "qiryah" "town", Biblical Hebrew "qiryāh") but retains in the construct state nominal form (e.g."qiryát yisrael" "town of Israel"); and retention of a verb form with infixed "-t-", also found in Arabic and Akkadian ("w-’ltḥm" "I began to fight", from the root "lḥm".)
Judeo-Yemeni Arabic
Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (also known as Judeo-Yemeni and Yemenite Judeo-Arabic) is a variety of Arabic spoken by Jews living or formerly living in Yemen. The language is quite different from mainstream Yemeni Arabic, and is written in the Hebrew alphabet. The cities of Sana'a, Aden, al-Bayda, and Habban District and the villages in their districts each have (or had) their own dialect.
Levantine Arabic
Ancient Arabia was home to a continuum of Central Semitic languages in antiquity which stretched from the southern Levant to Yemen. The isoglosses associated with Arabic are clustered at the northern end of this continuum, in the northern Hijaz and the southern Levant. This may be in part due to a lack of documentation, but it is clear that Central Arabia was home to languages quite distinct from Arabic. Thus, Arabic can be said to have emerged in the second millennium BC and spread into the peninsula, replacing its sister languages on the Central Semitic continuum.
Phoenician language
Like the grammar, the vocabulary is very close to Biblical Hebrew, though some peculiarities attract attention. For example, the copula verb "to be" is kn (as in Arabic, as opposed to Hebrew and Aramaic hyh) and the verb "to do" is pʿl (as in Aramaic pʿl and Arabic fʿl, as opposed to Hebrew ʿśh, though in Hebrew pʿl has the similar meaning "to act").
Biblical Aramaic
Biblical Hebrew is the main language of the Hebrew Bible. Aramaic accounts for only about 250 verses out of a total of over 23,000. Biblical Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew, as both are in the Northwest Semitic language family. Some obvious similarities and differences are listed below:
Arab citizens of Israel
The Israeli government regulates and finances most of the schools operating in the country, including the majority of those run by private organizations. The national school system has two major branches – a Hebrew-speaking branch and an Arabic-speaking branch. The curricula for the two systems are almost identical in mathematics, sciences, and English. It is different in humanities (history, literature, etc.). While Hebrew is taught as a second language in Arab schools since the third grade and obligatory for Arabic-speaking school's matriculation exams, only basic knowledge of Arabic is taught in Hebrew-speaking schools, usually from the 7th to the 9th grade. Arabic is not obligatory for Hebrew speaking school's matriculation exams. The schooling language split operates from preschool, up to the end of high school. At the university level, they merge into a single system, which operates mostly in Hebrew and in English.
Arabic
Arabic () ' or () ' or ) is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living from Mesopotamia in the east to the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, and in the Sinai Peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic.
Languages of Israel
Arabic was always considered a legitimate language for use in the Knesset alongside Hebrew, but only rarely have Arabic-speaking Knesset members made use of this privilege as while all Arabic-speaking MKs are fluent in Hebrew, fewer Hebrew-speaking MKs can understand Arabic.
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic is spoken in the fertile strip on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. To the east, in the desert, Northwest Arabian Arabic varieties are spoken by Bedouins. The transition to Egyptian Arabic in the south via the Negev and Sinai Peninsula, where Northwest Arabian Arabic is spoken and then the dialect of Sharqia Governorate, was described by de Jong in 1999. In this direction, the Egyptian city of Arish is the last one to display proper Levantine features. In a similar manner, the region of el-Karak announces Hijazi Arabic. In the North, the limit between Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic starts from the Turkish border near el-Rāʿi, and Sabkhat al-Jabbul is the north-eastern limit of Levantine Arabic, which includes further south al-Qaryatayn Damascus, and the Hauran.
Biblical Hebrew
The morphology of Proto-Central-Semitic shows significant changes compared with Proto-Semitic, especially in its verbs, and is much like in Classical Arabic. Nouns in the singular were usually declined in three cases: /-u/ (nominative), /-a/ (accusative) or /-i/ (genitive). In some circumstances (but never in the construct state), nouns also took a final nasal after the case ending: "nunation" (final /-n/) occurred in some languages, "mimation" (final /-m/) in others. The original meaning of this marker is uncertain. In Classical Arabic, final /-n/ on nouns indicates indefiniteness and disappears when the noun is preceded by a definite article or otherwise becomes definite in meaning. In other languages, final /-n/ may be present whenever a noun is not in the construct state. Old Canaanite had mimation, of uncertain meaning, in an occurrence of the word "urušalemim" (Jerusalem) as given in an Egyptian transcription.
Medieval Hebrew
The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to a distinct style of philosophical Hebrew. Many have direct parallels in medieval Arabic. The Ibn Tibbon family, and especially Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon were personally responsible for the creation of much of this form of Hebrew, which they employed in their translations of scientific materials from the Arabic. At that time, original Jewish philosophical and theological works produced in Spain were usually written in Arabic, but as time went on, this form of Hebrew was used for many original compositions as well.
Language of the New Testament
After the Babylonian captivity, Aramaic replaced Biblical Hebrew as the everyday language in Palestine. The two languages were as similar as two Romance languages or two Germanic languages today. Thus Biblical Hebrew, which was still used for religious purposes, was not totally unfamiliar, but still a somewhat strange norm that demanded a certain degree of training to be understood properly.
Saadia Ibn Danan
Rabbi Saadiah ben Maimon ben Moshe ibn Danan () (born 2nd half of 15th century in Granada, Spain – died 1493(?) in Oran, Algeria) was a grammarian of Hebrew and Arabic, poet and a halachic authority. He served as a dayan in Granada, and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain settled in Oran. Among his works are rabbinic Responsa, a Talmudic dictionary called "Sepher Arukh," works on Hebrew grammar and Hebrew verse, as well as a Hebrew dictionary written in Arabic. He was the first writer to compare Hebrew metre with its Arabic counterpart.
Jordanian Arabic
The grammar in Jordanian is quite the mixture. Much like Hebrew and Arabic, Jordanian is a Semitic language at heart, altered by the many influences that developed over the years.
Hebrew language
The modern English word "Hebrew" is derived from Old French "Ebrau", via Latin from the Greek "Ἑβραῖος" ("Hebraîos") and Aramaic "'ibrāy", all ultimately derived from Biblical Hebrew "Ibri" (), one of several names for the Israelite (Jewish and Samaritan) people. It is traditionally understood to be an adjective based on the name of Abraham's ancestor, Eber, mentioned in . The name is believed to be based on the Semitic root "ʕ-b-r" () meaning "beyond", "other side", "across"; interpretations of the term "Hebrew" generally render its meaning as roughly "from the other side [of the river/desert]"—i.e., an exonym for the inhabitants of the land of Israel/Judah, perhaps from the perspective of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, or the Transjordan (with the river referenced perhaps the Euphrates, Jordan, or Litani; or maybe the northern Arabian Desert between Babylonia and Canaan). Compare cognate Assyrian "ebru", of identical meaning.
Israelian Hebrew
Israelian Hebrew (or IH) is a proposed northern dialect of biblical Hebrew (BH). It is proposed as an explanation for various irregular linguistic features of the Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible. It competes with the alternative explanation that such features are Aramaisms, indicative either of late dates of composition, or of editorial emendations. Although IH is not a new proposal, it only started gaining ground as a challenge to older arguments to late dates for some biblical texts since about a decade before the turn of the 21st century: linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible might be "better" explained by synchronic rather than diachronic linguistics, meaning various biblical texts could be significantly older than many 20th century scholars supposed.
Albert Schultens
Schultens was the chief teacher of the Arabic language in the whole of the Europe during his lifetime. In some sense, he revived Arabic studies. He differed from J. J. Reiske and Silvestre de Sacy in regarding Arabic as a handmaid to Hebrew. Reiske considered Schultens' treatment of Arabic to be of little value, also maintaining that Arabic studies should not be taught as part of theology, but as a subject matter in its own right, as was mathematics, physics, geography and medicine. Schultens vindicated the value of comparative study of the Semitic tongues against those who, like Jacques Gousset, regarded Hebrew as a sacred tongue with which comparative philology has nothing to do.
Judeo-Arabic languages
Like other Jewish languages and dialects, Judeo-Arabic languages contain borrowings from Hebrew and Aramaic. This feature is less marked in translations of the Bible, as the authors clearly took the view that the business of a translator is to translate.Jews in Arabic, Muslim majority countries wrote—sometimes in their dialects, sometimes in a more classical style—in a mildly adapted Hebrew alphabet rather than using the Arabic script, often including consonant dots from the Arabic alphabet to accommodate phonemes that did not exist in the Hebrew alphabet.
Canaanite shift
Arabic فاعل "(fāʻil)" vs. Hebrew פועל "(pōʻel)"
Arabic
The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages Aramaic, which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, Ethiopic, and to a lesser degree Hebrew (mainly religious concepts). In addition, many cultural, religious and political terms have entered Arabic from Iranian languages, notably Middle Persian, Parthian, and (Classical) Persian, and Hellenistic Greek ("kīmiyāʼ" has as origin the Greek "khymia", meaning in that language the melting of metals; see Roger Dachez, "Histoire de la Médecine de l'Antiquité au XXe siècle", Tallandier, 2008, p. 251), "alembic" (distiller) from "ambix" (cup), "almanac" (climate) from "almenichiakon" (calendar). (For the origin of the last three borrowed words, see Alfred-Louis de Prémare, "Foundations of Islam", Seuil, L'Univers Historique, 2002.) Some Arabic borrowings from Semitic or Persian languages are, as presented in De Prémare's above-cited book:
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family and the Canaanite branch of the North-West semitic subgroup. While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah eras and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax, the consensus among scholars is that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state, being a koiné language based on historical layers of Hebrew, as well as incorporating foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution. A minority of scholars argue that the revived language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European. These theories have not been met with general acceptance, and the consensus among a majority of scholars is that Modern Hebrew, despite non-Semitic influences, can correctly be classified as a Semitic language.
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic is a variety of Arabic and as such shares many features with other modern varieties, especially the Maghrebi varieties of Arabic. Some of its distinctive features (compared to other Arabic dialects) are listed here.The Arabic dialects of Tunisia belong to either pre-Hilalian or Hilalian dialectal families.
Sacred language
However, Classical Arabic is not itself sacred, and holds no inherent spiritual significance. This is unlike, for example, the significance of Biblical Hebrew in Judaism, Sanskrit in Hinduism, or Avestan in Zoroastrianism. Though the Qur'an was revealed to Muhammad in Arabic, other prophets received revelation in their own languages - e.g., Moses was revealed the Torah in Hebrew, and Jesus was revealed the Injil in Aramaic. These revelations were no less divine than the Qur'an; their texts have only become less divine, as their original message was corrupted over generations. The Arabic used in Muslim worship was also the same language used in day-to-day life by Arabs at the time, and the fact that the Qur'an was revealed to humans in Arabic does not make the Arabic language itself more sacred than any other. Sermons are delivered in local vernacular.
Hebrews
Hebrews (Hebrew: עברים or עבריים, ', '; ', '; ', ') is a term appearing 34 times within 32 verses of the Hebrew Bible. While the term was not an ethnonym, it is mostly taken as synonymous with the Semitic-speaking Israelites, especially in the pre-monarchic period when they were still nomadic. However, in some instances it may also be used in a wider sense, referring to the Phoenicians, or to other ancient groups, such as the group known as Shasu of "Yhw" on the eve of the Bronze Age collapse.
Languages of Israel
Literary Arabic, along with Hebrew, has special status under Israeli law, and was the country's second official language until 2018, when Hebrew was declared the sole official language. Various spoken dialects are used. Arabic is the native language among Israeli-Arabs. In 1949, 156,000 Palestinian Arabs were left inside Israel’s armistice line, most of whom did not speak Hebrew. Today, the figure stands at about 1.6 million, and although most are proficient in Hebrew, Arabic remains their primary native language.
Middle East
Perhaps because of the influence of the Western press, the Arabic equivalent of "Middle East" (Arabic: الشرق الأوسط "ash-Sharq al-Awsaṭ") has become standard usage in the mainstream Arabic press, comprising the same meaning as the term "Middle East" in North American and Western European usage. The designation, "Mashriq", also from the Arabic root for "East", also denotes a variously defined region around the Levant, the eastern part of the Arabic-speaking world (as opposed to the "Maghreb", the western part). Even though the term originated in the West, apart from Arabic, other languages of countries of the Middle East also use a translation of it. The Persian equivalent for Middle East is خاورمیانه ("Khāvar-e miyāneh"), the Hebrew is המזרח התיכון ("hamizrach hatikhon") and the Turkish is Orta Doğu.
Arab Jews
Jews living in Arab-majority countries speak Arabic, using one of the many Arabic dialects (see also Judeo-Arabic languages) as their primary community language, with Hebrew used for liturgical and cultural purposes (literature, philosophy, poetry, etc.). Many aspects of their culture (music, clothes, food, architecture of synagogues and houses, etc.) have commonality with local Arab population. They usually follow Sephardi Jewish liturgy, making them one of the largest groups among Mizrahi Jews. Most of the population was either forced out, fled or voluntarily left after the founding of Israel in 1948, for the new Jewish state or to Western Europe, and a few went to the United States and Latin America. The term was not commonly used until the modern era.
Languages of Palestine
Palestinian Arabic is the primary language spoken by Palestinians and has a unique dialect. A Levantine Arabic dialect subgroup, it is spoken in Palestine by Arab citizens of Israel (mostly Palestinians) and in most Palestinian populations around the world. However, Palestinian refugees in other parts of the world may have a different dialect from Palestinian Arabic. In the West Bank, there are many Israeli settlements in which, since the early 20th century, Hebrew has become more common. However, Russian and Amharic has also started to appear resulting from aliyah from Ethiopia. Other Jewish migrants have also brought other European languages.
Semitic languages
Despite the ascendancy of Arabic in the Middle East, other Semitic languages still exist. Biblical Hebrew, long extinct as a colloquial language and in use only in Jewish literary, intellectual, and liturgical activity, was revived in spoken form at the end of the 19th century. Modern Hebrew is the main language of Israel, with Biblical Hebrew remaining as the language of liturgy and religious scholarship of Jews worldwide.
Tunisian Arabic
Tunisian Arabic is one of the Arabic languages within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. It is a variety of Maghrebi Arabic like Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, which are mostly unintelligible to Modern Standard or Mashriqi Arabic speakers. It has a considerable number of pre-hilalian dialects but is usually considered in its koiné form to be a mostly Hilalian variety of Maghrebi Arabic because it was affected by the immigration of Banu Hilal in the 11th century, as were the other Maghrebi varieties.
Arab citizens of Israel
Many Arab villages lack street signs of any kind and the Hebrew name is often used. The state's schools in Arab communities teach in Arabic according to a specially adapted curriculum. This curriculum includes mandatory lessons of Hebrew as foreign language from the 3rd grade onwards. Arabic is taught in Hebrew-speaking schools, but only the basic level is mandatory. In the summer of 2008, there was an unsuccessful attempt of right-wing lawmakers to strip Arabic of its status alongside Hebrew as an official language of the state.
Arabic
In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Qur'an was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi.
Phoenicianism
The Arabic language is considered to exist in multiple forms: formal Arabic, commonly known as Modern Standard Arabic (a modern incarnation of Koranic or Classical Arabic), which is used in written documents and formal contexts; and dialectal variants, numbering some thirty vernacular speech forms, used in day-to-day contexts, and varying widely from country to country. The one spoken in Lebanon is called "Lebanese Arabic" or simply "Lebanese", and it is a type of Levantine Arabic, which, together with Mesopotamian Arabic, is classed by matter of convenience as a type of Northern Arabic. The point of controversy between Phoenicianists and their opponents lies in whether the differences between the Arabic varieties are sufficient to consider them separate languages. The former cite Prof. Wheeler Thackston of Harvard: "the languages the 'Arabs' grow up speaking at home, are as different from each other and from Arabic itself, as Latin is different from English."
Biblical Hebrew
The oldest form of Biblical Hebrew, Archaic Hebrew, is found in poetic sections of the Bible and inscriptions dating to around 1000 BCE, the early Monarchic Period. This stage is also known as Old Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew, and is the oldest stratum of Biblical Hebrew. The oldest known artifacts of Archaic Biblical Hebrew are various sections of the Tanakh, including the Song of Moses (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). Biblical poetry uses a number of distinct lexical items, for example for prose 'see', for 'great'. Some have cognates in other Northwest Semitic languages, for example 'do' and 'gold' which are common in Canaanite and Ugaritic. Grammatical differences include the use of , , and as relative particles, negative , and various differences in verbal and pronominal morphology and syntax.
Arab (etymology)
The early Nabateans are also referred to as "ʿarvim" in Nehemiah 4:7 and the singular "ʿarvi" is applied to Geshem a leader who opposed Nehemiah. This term is identical to "ʿaravi" in unvowelled text but traditionally vowelized differently. It is usually translated "Arabian" or "Arab" and was used in early 20th century Hebrew to mean Arab. However it is unclear if the term related more to "ʿarav" or to "ʿerev". On the one hand its vowelization resembles that of the term "ʿarvati" (Arbathite) which is understood as an adjective formed from "ʿaravah "; thus it is plausibly a similarly formed adjective from "ʿarav" and thus a variant of "ʿaravi ". On the other hand, it is used in 2 Chronicles 21:16 for a seemingly different people located in Africa plausibly the same Africans referred to as an "ʿerev" (mix of people) in Ezekiel 30:5. Any of the other meanings of the root are also possible as the origin of the name.
Hebrew name
Some of these Arabic names preserve original Hebrew pronunciations that were later changed by regular sound shifts; "migdal", recorded in the New Testament as "Magdal"ene and in Palestinian Arabic as "Majdala", which turned "a" in unstressed closed syllables into "i".
Judeo-Moroccan Arabic
Widely used in the Jewish community during its long history there, the Moroccan dialect of Judeo-Arabic has many influences from languages other than Arabic, including Spanish (due to the close proximity of Spain), Haketia or Moroccan Judeo-Spanish, due to the influx of Sephardic refugees from Spain after the 1492 expulsion, and French (due to the period in which Morocco was colonized by France), and, of course, the inclusion of many Hebrew loanwords and phrases (a feature of all Jewish languages). The dialect has considerable mutual intelligibility with Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, and some with Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, but almost none with Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.
Arabic definite article
Weingreen also states that the original form of the Hebrew "ha-" was in fact "hal". Hebrew, then, dropped the final "l" to achieve "ha"- while Arabic softened the "h"- to a hamza, resulting in "al"-. However, there is no evidence supporting the existence of "hal" from ancient Hebrew texts. In fact, as early as the 6th century BC both "han" (a probable predecessor of the Hebrew "ha") and "al" were being used simultaneously in different Arabic dialects, namely Northern and Central.
Varieties of Arabic
Southern Varieties are slightly influenced by Persian and other South Asian languagesJewish varieties are influenced by the Hebrew and Aramaic languages.
Varieties of Arabic
There are many varieties of Arabic (also called dialects of Arabic or vernacular languages) in existence. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated on the Arabian Peninsula. It is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are not easily comprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf. Within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages.
List of countries where Arabic is an official language
The Arabic language (alongside Hebrew) also remained as an official language in the State of Israel for the first 70 years after the proclamation in 1948 until 2018. The Knesset canceled the status of Arabic as an official language by adopting the relevant on 19 July 2018. This Israeli Basic Law states in No. 4 (A) that ""The state’s language is Hebrew.""
Baghdad Jewish Arabic
Baghdad Jewish Arabic (and Baghdadi Christian Arabic) resemble the dialect of Northern Iraq, and more distantly that of Syria, rather than the Baghdad Arabic spoken by the Muslims. The Muslim dialect is classified as a "gilit" dialect (from their pronunciation of the Arabic word for "I said") while the others are "qeltu" dialects. Another resemblance between Baghdad Jewish Arabic and North Mesopotamian Arabic is the pronunciation of "ra" as a uvular. This peculiarity goes back centuries: in medieval Iraqi Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts the letters "ra" and "ghayn" are frequently interchanged. It is thought that the "qeltu" dialects represent the older Arabic dialect of Mesopotamia while the "gilit" dialect is of Bedouin origin. Another factor may be the northern origins of the Jewish community of Baghdad after 1258 (see below under History). Like Northern Mesopotamian and Syrian Arabic, Jewish Baghdadi Arabic shows some signs of an Aramaic substrate. Violette Shamosh records that, at the Passover Seder, she could understand some of the passages in Aramaic but none of the passages in Hebrew.
Revival of the Hebrew language
The revival of the Hebrew language took place in Europe and Israel 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 a diversity of Jews started arriving and establishing themselves alongside the pre-existing Jewish community of Palestine in the first half of the nineteenth century, when veteran Jews in Palestine (largely Arabic-speaking by that time) and the linguistically diverse newly arrived Jews all switched to use Hebrew as a lingua franca, the historical linguistic common denominator of all the Jewish groups. At the same time, a parallel development in Europe changed Hebrew from primarily a sacred liturgical language into a literary language which played a key role in the development of nationalist educational programs. Modern Hebrew was one of three official languages of Mandatory Palestine, and after the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, one of two official languages of Israel, along with Modern Arabic. In July 2018, a made Hebrew the sole official language of the state of Israel, with Arabic having "special status". 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 and Israeli policy.
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew or Israeli Hebrew (, "ʿivrít ḥadašá[h]", – "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew ( "Ivrit"), is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. Spoken in ancient times, Hebrew, a member of the Canaanite branch of the Semitic language family, was supplanted as the Jewish vernacular by the western dialect of Aramaic beginning in the third century BCE, though it continued to be used as a liturgical and literary language. It was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is the official language of Israel.
Lebanese Arabic
Lebanese Arabic shares many features with other modern varieties of Arabic. Lebanese Arabic, like many other spoken Levantine Arabic varieties, has a syllable structure very different from that of Modern Standard Arabic. While Standard Arabic can have only one consonant at the beginning of a syllable, after which a vowel must follow, Lebanese Arabic commonly has two consonants in the onset.Several commentators, including Nassim Taleb, have claimed that the Lebanese vernacular is not in fact a variety of Arabic at all, but rather a separate Central Semitic language, descended from Aramaic with the many Arabic and Turkish loanwords and use of the Arabic alphabet disguising the language's true nature. Taleb recommended that the language be called Northwestern Levantine or neo-Canaanite. This classification is not widely accepted by linguists.
Biblical Hebrew
Hebrew has almost lost the broken plural (if it ever had it), and any vestigial forms that may remain have been extended with the strong plural endings. The dual and strong plural endings were likely much like the Arabic forms given above at one point, with only the objective-case forms ultimately surviving. For example, dual "-ayim" is probably from "*-aymi" with an extended mimation ending (cf. Arabic "-ayni" above), while dual construct "-ē" is from "*-ay" without mimation. Similarly, "-īm" < "*-īma", "-ōt" < "*-āti". (Note that expected plural construct state "*-ī" was replaced by dual "-ē".)
Hebrew language
Mizrahi (Oriental) Hebrew is actually a collection of dialects spoken liturgically by Jews in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world. It was possibly influenced by the Aramaic and Arabic languages, and in some cases by Sephardi Hebrew, although some linguists maintain that it is the direct heir of Biblical Hebrew and thus represents the true dialect of Hebrew. The same claim is sometimes made for Yemenite Hebrew or "Temanit", which differs from other Mizrahi dialects by having a radically different vowel system, and distinguishing between different diacritically marked consonants that are pronounced identically in other dialects (for example gimel and "ghimel".)
Phoenician alphabet
The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, used to write early Hebrew, was a regional offshoot of Phoenician; it is nearly identical to the Phoenician (in many early writings they are impossible to distinguish). The Samaritan alphabet is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew. The current Hebrew alphabet is a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet, itself a descendant of the Phoenician script.
Bible translations into Arabic
Translations of the Bible into Arabic are known from the early Christian churches in Syria, Egypt, Malta and Spain. Some of these translations are from Syriac (the Peshitta), Coptic or Latin. The earliest fragment of the Old Testament in Arabic is a text of Psalm 77, found in the Umayyad Mosque, dating from the 8th century. 
One of the oldest Arabic bibles was discovered in the 19th century at Saint Catherine's Monastery. The manuscript called Mt. Sinai Arabic Codex 151, was created in AD 867. It includes the biblical text, marginal comments, lectionary notes, and glosses, as found in the manuscript. Most Arabic translations have translated Yahweh (יהוה), the Hebrew name of God (LORD or Jehovah in English / Kyrios in Greek), as Allāh or Ar-rabb ( or , respectively). These are similar to the appellations utilized by Muslims in Classical Arabic, but the term Ar-rabb is quite distinct from Muslim usage, which normally does not use the definite article, instead predominantly making use of a vocative without an article or affixed possessive pronoun. The Aramaic Mār / Mōr (teacher or lord) is translated as Rabb or Sayyid ( or , respectively). There are many cases where an etymological root exists between an Arabic word and the original Hebrew or Aramaic text, yet it is translated into a colloquial or a commonly used word instead.
There are many New Testament translations or portions into regional colloquial forms of Arabic e.g. Egyptian Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic and Chadian Arabic etc.
Palestinian Arabic
The noticeable differences between southern and northern forms of Levantine Arabic, such as Syrian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic, are stronger in non-urban dialects. The main differences between Palestinian and northern Levantine Arabic are as follows:There are also typical Palestinian words that are shibboleths in the Levant.
Medieval Hebrew
Mention should also be made of the letters preserved in the Cairo geniza, which reflect the Arabic-influenced Hebrew of medieval Egyptian Jewry. The Arabic terms and syntax that appear in the letters constitute a significant source for the documentation of spoken medieval Arabic, since Jews in Islamic lands tended to use colloquial Arabic in writing rather than classical Arabic, which is the Arabic that appears in Arabic medieval sources.
List of countries where Arabic is an official language
Arabic was an official language of Mandatory Palestine and was retained as an official language when the State of Israel was founded in 1948. In 2018, the Knesset upgraded the status of Hebrew from official to State language of Israel, and gave Arabic a special status in the State by adopting the relevant Basic Law. The (an Israeli Basic Law which specifies the nature of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People) states in No. 4 (B) that ""The Arabic language has a special status in the state; Regulating the use of Arabic in state institutions or by them will be set in law."" The law declares in No. 4 (C): ""This clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before this law came into effect."" The law was adopted by the Knesset 62 in favor, 55 against and two abstentions on 19 July 2018.
Medieval Hebrew
Medieval Hebrew was a literary and liturgical language that existed between the 4th and 18th century. It was not commonly used as a spoken language, but mainly in written form by rabbis, scholars and poets. Medieval Hebrew had many features that distinguished it from older forms of Hebrew. These affected grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and also included a wide variety of new lexical items, which were either based on older forms or borrowed from other languages, especially Aramaic, Greek and Latin.
In the Golden age of Jewish culture in the Iberian Peninsula, important work was done by grammarians in explaining the grammar and vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew; much of this was based on the work of the grammarians of Classical Arabic. Important Hebrew grammarians were Judah ben David Hayyuj and Jonah ibn Janah. A great deal of poetry was written, by poets such as Dunash ben Labrat, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi, David Hakohen and the two Ibn Ezras, in a "purified" Hebrew based on the work of these grammarians, and in Arabic quantitative metres (see piyyut). This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets.
Hejazi Arabic
Also referred to as the sedentary Hejazi dialect, this is the form most commonly associated with the term "Hejazi Arabic", and is spoken in the urban centers of the region, such as Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. With respect to the axis of bedouin versus sedentary dialects of the Arabic language, this dialect group exhibits features of both. Like other sedentary dialects, the urban Hejazi dialect is less conservative than the bedouin varieties in some aspects and has therefore shed some Classical forms and features that are still present in bedouin dialects, these include gender-number disagreement, and the feminine marker "-n" (see Varieties of Arabic). But in contrast to bedouin dialects, the constant use of full vowels and the absence of vowel reduction plus the distinction between the emphatic letters and is generally retained.The Arabic of today is derived principally from the old dialects of Central and North Arabia which were divided by the classical Arab grammarians into three groups: Hejaz, Najd, and the language of the tribes in adjoining areas. Though the modern Hejazi dialects has developed markedly since the development of Classical Arabic, and Modern Standard Arabic is quite distinct from the modern dialect of Hejaz. Standard Arabic now differs considerably from modern Hejazi Arabic in terms of its phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, such diglossia in Arabic began to emerge at the latest in the sixth century CE when oral poets recited their poetry in a proto-Classical Arabic based on archaic dialects which differed greatly from their own.
Hebrew keyboard
A Hebrew keyboard (Hebrew: מקלדת עברית "mikledet ivrit") comes in two different keyboard layouts. Most Hebrew keyboards are bilingual, as Latin characters are necessary for URLs and Email addresses. Trilingual keyboard options also exist, with the third script being Arabic or Russian, due to the sizable Arabic- and Russian-speaking populations in Israel.
Varieties of Arabic
Classical Arabic varies widely from a dialect to another with , and being the most common:
Classical Arabic (Modern Standard ) varies widely from a dialect to another with , and being the most common:Classical interdental consonants and become or in some words in Egypt, Sudan, most of the Levant, parts of the Arabian peninsula (urban Hejaz and parts of Yemen). In Morocco, Algeria and other parts of North Africa they are consonantly , but remain and in most of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Tunisia, parts of Yemen, rural Palestinian, Eastern Libyan, and some rural Algerian dialects. In Arabic-speaking towns of Eastern Turkey, (Urfa, Siirt and Mardin) they respectively become .
Northern varieties are influenced by the Aramaic language.
Languages of Israel
On 19 July 2018, the Knesset passed a basic law under the title , which defines Hebrew as "the State's language" and Arabic as a language with "a special status in the State" (article 4). The law further says that it should not be interpreted as compromising the status of the Arabic language in practice prior to the enactment of the basic law, namely, it preserves the status quo and changes the status of Hebrew and Arabic only nominally.
Yemenite Hebrew
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Jacob Saphir have praised the Yemenites in their correct pronunciation of Hebrew. They still read the biblical lections and liturgies according to what is prescribed for Hebrew grammar and are meticulous to pronounce the mobile "šĕwā" in each of its changing forms. While most other communities also adhere to the rule of mobile "šĕwā" whenever two "šĕwā"s are written one after the other, as in , most have forgotten its other usages.
Aharon Ben-Asher, in his treatise on the proper usage of Hebrew vowels and trope symbols, writes on the "šĕwā": "[It is] the servant of all the letters in the entire Scriptures, whether at the beginning of the word, or in the middle of the word, or at the end of the word; whether what is pronounced by the tongue or not pronounced, for it has many ways… However, if it is joined with one of four [guttural] letters, א ח ה ע, its manner [of pronunciation] will be like the manner of the vowel of the second letter in that word, such as: בְּֽהֹנוֹת ידיהם ורגליהם = "bhonoth"; מתי פתים תְּֽאֵהֲבוּ פתי = "t’ehavu"; עיניו לְֽחֵלְכָה יצפנו = "lḥeləkhah"; שריה רְֽעֵלָיָה מרדכי = "rʻeloyoh"." 
On the mobile "šĕwā" and its usage amongst Yemenite Jews, Israeli grammarian Shelomo Morag wrote: "The pronunciation of the "šĕwā" mobile preceding א, ה, ח, ע, or ר in the Yemenite tradition is realized in accordance with the vowel following the guttural; quantitatively, however, this is an ultra-short vowel. For example, a word such as is pronounced "wḥuṭ". A "šĕwā" preceding a "yōḏ" is pronounced as an ultra-short "ḥīreq": the word is pronounced "byōm". This is the way the "šĕwā" is known to have been pronounced in the Tiberian tradition."
Biblical Hebrew
Broken plural forms in Arabic are declined like singulars, and often take singular agreement as well. Dual and "strong plural" forms use endings with a long vowel or diphthong, declined in only two cases: nominative and objective (combination accusative/genitive), with the objective form often becoming the default one after the loss of case endings. Both Hebrew and Arabic had a special form of nunation/mimation that co-occurred with the dual and masculine sound plural endings whenever the noun was not in the construct state. The endings were evidently felt as an inherent part of the ending and, as a result, are still used. Examples are Arabic strong masculine plural "-ūna" (nominative), "-īna" (objective), and dual endings "-āni" (nominative), "-ayni" (objective); corresponding construct-state endings are "-ū, -ī" (strong masculine plural), "-ā, -ay" (dual). (The strong feminine endings in Classical Arabic are "-ātu" nominative, "-āti" objective, marked with a singular-style "-n" nunation in the indefinite state only.)
Dunash ibn Tamim
Moses ibn Ezra says that Ibn Tamim compares the two languages according to their lexicographical, not their grammatical, relations, and in this respect is less successful than Abu Ibrahim Ibn Barun at a later period. The latter also criticized certain details of Ibn Tamim's book. In the Yetzirah commentary Ibn Tamim says: "If God assists me and prolongs my life, I shall complete the work in which I have stated that Hebrew is the original tongue of mankind and older than the Arabic; furthermore, the book will show the relationship of the two languages, and that every pure word in the Arabic can be found in the Hebrew; that the Hebrew is a purified Arabic; and that the names of certain things are identical in both languages."
History of Hebrew grammar
Solomon ibn Gabirol in the 11th century composed a versified Hebrew grammar, consisting of 400 verses divided into ten parts. In the 12th century, Ibn Barun compared the Hebrew language with Arabic in the Islamic grammatical tradition.
11th to 12th century grammarians of the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain included Judah ben David Hayyuj, Jonah ibn Janah, Abraham ibn Ezra, Joseph Kimhi, Moses Kimhi and David Kimhi. Ibn Ezra gives a list of the oldest Hebrew grammarians in the introduction to his "Moznayim" (1140).
Roger Bacon was "a tolerable Hebrew scholar". Profiat Duran published an influential grammar in 1403.
Ghil'ad Zuckermann
Zuckermann argues that Israeli Hebrew, which he calls "Israeli", is a hybrid language that is genetically both Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic and Romance) and Afro-Asiatic (Semitic). He suggests that "Israeli" is the continuation not only of literary Hebrew(s) but also of Yiddish, as well as Polish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic and other languages spoken by Hebrew revivalists.
Samaritan Hebrew
For the Samaritans, Ancient Hebrew ceased to be a spoken everyday language and was succeeded by Samaritan Aramaic, which itself ceased to be a spoken language some time between the 10th and 12th centuries and was succeeded by Arabic (or more specifically Samaritan Palestinian Arabic).
Palestinian Arabic
Palestinian Arabic is a Southern Levantine Arabic dialect, spoken by most Palestinians in Palestine and israel and in the Palestinian diaspora populations. Together with Jordanian Arabic, it has the ISO 639-3 language code "ajp", known as South Levantine Arabic. Further dialects can be distinguished within Palestine, such as spoken in the northern West Bank, that spoken by Palestinians in the Hebron area, which is similar to Jordan and south-western Syria.
Tsvi Misinai
For those who maintained a Samaritan identity and religious association into modern times, they too, like their Palestinian counterparts who had additionally adopted Christianity and later Islam, were nevertheless thoroughly Arabized in language and culture. After the establishment of modern Israel, Samaritans living in what became the State of Israel replaced Palestinian Arabic with modern Hebrew as their day to day language (although Samaritan Hebrew had always been maintained as the liturgical language, along with liturgical Samaritan Aramaic and liturgical Samaritan Arabic).
Arabic language in Israel
Modern Standard Arabic (also known as Standard Arabic or Literary Arabic), is currently an auxiliary language in Israel and its use on government documents is mandated by law. Spoken Arabic dialects are spoken primarily by Arab citizens of Israel and Israeli Druze, as well as by some Mizrahi Jews, particularly those of the older generation who immigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. In 1949, 156,000 Palestinian Arabs were left inside Israel's armistice line, most of whom did not speak Hebrew. Today the majority of Arab Israelis, who constitute over a fifth of the Israeli population, speak Hebrew fluently, as a second language.
Semitic languages
Sometimes, certain roots differ in meaning from one Semitic language to another. For example, the root "b-y-ḍ" in Arabic has the meaning of "white" as well as "egg", whereas in Hebrew it only means "egg". The root "l-b-n" means "milk" in Arabic, but the color "white" in Hebrew. The root "l-ḥ-m" means "meat" in Arabic, but "bread" in Hebrew and "cow" in Ethiopian Semitic; the original meaning was most probably "food". The word "medina" (root: m-d-n) has the meaning of "metropolis" in Amharic, "city" in Arabic and Ancient Hebrew, and "State" in Modern Hebrew.
Arab (etymology)
In the Bible, the word "ʿarav" is closely associated with the word "ʿerev" meaning a "mix of people" which has identical spelling in unvowelled text. Jeremiah 25:24 parallels "kings of "ʿarav "" with "kings of the "ʿerev" that dwell in the wilderness". The account in 1 Kings 10:15 matching 2 Chronicles 9:14 is traditionally vowellized to read "kings of the "ʿerev" ". The people in question are understood to be the early Nabateans who do indeed appear to have been a mix of different tribes. The medieval writer Ibn an-Nadim, in "Kitab al-Fihrist", derived the word "Arab" from a Syriac pun by Abraham on the same root: in his account, Abraham addresses Ishmael and calls him "uʿrub", from Syriac "ʿrob", "mingle".
Edomite language
Edomite was a Canaanite language, very similar to Hebrew, spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel in the 1st millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Phoenician alphabet. Like Moabite, it retained feminine "-t". However, in the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as "whb" ("gave") and "tgr" ("merchant") entered the language, with "whb" becoming especially common in proper names.
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic (, , autonym: "il-lahje š-šāmiyye") is a broad variety of Arabic and the main vernacular spoken Arabic of the eastern coastal strip of the Levantine Sea that includes parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey. With numerous dialects and over 30 million native speakers worldwide, it is considered one of the five major varieties of Arabic. In the frame of the general diglossia status of the Arab world, Levantine Arabic is used for daily spoken use, while most of the written and official documents and media use Modern Standard Arabic.
Arabic language in Israel
Israel's large population of Arabic-speakers, its location in the Middle East, decades of globalization, and the Mizrahi heritage of the majority of Israel's Jewish population have all influenced spoken Hebrew in Israel. After Hebrew and English, Arabic songs (sung both by native Arab speakers and by Mizrahi Israelis) are frequently played on the radio. A-WA's debut single, Habib-Galbi, released in 2015, was the first Arabic language song to reach number 1 on Israeli radio and Arabic plays a very prominent role in the "slang" (street language) of Israel's youth.
Hebrew language
Currently, 90% of Israeli Jews are proficient in Hebrew, and 70% are highly proficient. Some 60% of Israeli Arabs are also proficient in Hebrew, and 30% report having a higher proficiency in Hebrew than in Arabic. In total, about 53% of the Israeli population speaks Hebrew as a native language, while most of the rest speak it fluently. However, in 2013 Hebrew was the native language of only 49% of Israelis over the age of 20, with Russian, Arabic, French, English, Yiddish and Ladino being the native tongues of most of the rest. Some 26% of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and 12% of Arabs reported speaking Hebrew poorly or not at all.
Languages of Israel
In addition, a significant number of Israeli Jews know spoken Arabic, although only a very small number are fully literate in written Arabic. Arabic is the native language of older generations of Mizrahi Jews who immigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. Arabic lessons are widespread in Hebrew-speaking schools from the seventh through ninth grades. Those who wish to do so may opt to continue their Arabic studies through the twelfth grade and take an Arabic matriculation exam. A 2015 study found that 17% of Israeli Jews can understand Arabic and 10% can speak it fluently, but only 2.5% can read an article in the language, 1.5% can write a letter in it, and 1% can read a book in it.
Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic
Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (also known as Tripolitanian Judeo-Arabic, Jewish Tripolitanian-Libyan Arabic, Tripolita'it, Yudi) is a variety of Arabic spoken by Jews formerly living in Libya. Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic differs from standard Libyan Arabic in that it closely resembles the original dialect of the sedentary population, whereas much of Libya's population now speaks Bedouin-influenced varieties of Arabic. A reference grammar is available.
Sephardi Hebrew
Sephardi Hebrew (or Sepharadi Hebrew) is the pronunciation system for Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jewish practice. Its phonology was influenced by contact languages such as Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), Arabic, Portuguese and Modern Greek.
Yemenite Hebrew
Although the vast majority of post-Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic words are pronounced the same way or nearly the same way by all of Israel's diverse ethnic groups, including the Jews of Yemen, there are still other words whose phonemic system differs greatly from the way it is used in Modern Hebrew, the sense here being the tradition of vocalization or diction of selective Hebrew words found in the Mishnah and Midrashic literature, or of Aramaic words found in the Talmud, and which tradition has been meticulously preserved by the Jews of Yemen. The following diagrams show a few of the more conspicuous differences in the Yemenite tradition of vocalization and which Israeli linguist, Shelomo Morag, believes reflects an ancient form of vocalizing the texts and was once known and used by all Hebrew-speakers.
Semitic languages
The West Semitic languages significantly reshaped the system. The most substantial changes occurred in the Central Semitic languages (the ancestors of modern Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic). Essentially, the old prefix-conjugated jussive and/or preterite became a new non-past (or imperfect), while the stative became a new past (or perfect), and the old prefix-conjugated non-past (or imperfect) with gemination was discarded. New suffixes were used to mark different moods in the non-past, e.g. Classical Arabic "-u" (indicative), "-a" (subjunctive), vs no suffix (jussive). (It is not generally agreed whether the systems of the various Semitic languages are better interpreted in terms of tense, i.e. past vs. non-past, or aspect, i.e. perfect vs. imperfect.) A special feature in classical Hebrew is the waw-consecutive, prefixing a verb form with the letter waw in order to change its tense or aspect. The South Semitic languages show a system somewhere between the East and Central Semitic languages.
Samaritan Hebrew
The phonology of Samaritan Hebrew is very similar to that of Samaritan Arabic, and is used by the Samaritans in prayer. Today, the spoken vernacular among Samaritans is evenly split between Modern Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, depending on whether they reside in Holon (Israel) or in Shechem (i.e. Nablus, in Palestine’s Area A).
Anton Shammas
Arabic into Hebrew
Beta Israel
The sources of De Almeida's knowledge are not spelled out, but they at least reflect contemporary views. His comments regarding the Hebrew knowledge of the Beta Israel of that time is very significant: it could not have come from recent intercourse with Jews elsewhere, so it indicates deep antiquity to Beta Israel traditions, at least at that time, before their literature was taken away from them and demolished by the later conquering Christians. (The more sceptical school of historians, whose views are discussed above, deny that the Ethiopian Jews ever knew Hebrew; they certainly have no Hebrew texts remaining, and have been forced in recent centuries to use the Christian "Old Testament" in Ge'ez after their own literature was destroyed.) It is also of interest that he mentions more Jewish communities dwelling beyond Ethiopia in the Sudan. As so often in such medieval hearsay accounts, however, loose claims are made that may not be accurate. The Beta Israel were not predominantly of the Arabic race, for instance, but he may have meant the term loosely or meant that they also knew Arabic.
Isa (name)
There is a major discrepancy between the Hebrew/Aramaic and Muslim Arabic forms of this name, since the Hebrew form of this name has the voiced pharyngeal ʿAyin or ʿAyn consonant at the end of the name (as does Christian Arabic "yasūʿ"), while the Muslim Arabic form "ʿīsā" has the ʿAyn at the beginning of the name. For this reason, some (such as Ahmed Deedat) state the Arabic name Isa is related to the Biblical name Esau (which begins with a pharyngeal); it is also similar in the vowels to an Aramaic version of Jesus, viz. "Eeshoʿ" (Aramaic forms of the name, however, still have the voiced pharyngeal `Ayn consonant at the end of the name). [Other Aramaic pronunciations of the same name include yeshuuʕ (ʕ is IPA ayin). Vowels in Semitic languages are somewhat fluid between dialects while consonants are structurally more stable. The vowels in an Anglicized quote "Eesho`" by themselves are insignificant for this discussion since "i" and "e" and short "a" can interchange between dialects, and "u" and "o" can also interchange between dialects. The dominant consonsonantal discrepancy remains, between Aramaic yeshuuʕ [consonantal y-sh-w-ʕ] and Arabic ʕiisa [consonantal ʕ-y-s-alef].]
Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew ( "Ivrit Miqra'it" or "Leshon ha-Miqra"), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of Hebrew, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken by the Israelites in the area known as Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term "Hebrew" was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as ("sefat kena'an", i.e. language of Canaan) or ("Yehudit", i.e. Judaean), but the name was used in Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. It is more or less mutually intelligible with modern Hebrew.
Arab citizens of Israel
Arab citizens of Israel, or Arab Israelis, are Israeli citizens who are Arab. Many Arab citizens of Israel self-identify as Palestinian and commonly self-designate themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel or Israeli Palestinians, though only about 13% of them hold a Palestinian nationality ID in addition to the Israeli one. A notable percentage of Arab citizens in Israel refer to themselves as Israeli Arabs, while rejecting Palestinian identity. The traditional vernacular of most Arab citizens, irrespective of religion, is Levantine Arabic, including Lebanese Arabic in the North of Israel, Palestinian dialect of Arabic in Central Israel and Bedouin dialects across the Negev desert; having absorbed much Hebrew loanwords and phrases, the modern dialect of Arab citizens of Israel is defined by some as the "Israeli Arabic dialect". Most Arab citizens of Israel are functionally bilingual, their second language being Modern Hebrew. By religious affiliation, most are Muslim, particularly of the Sunni branch of Islam. There is a significant Arab Christian minority from various denominations as well as the Druze, among other religious communities.
Tihamiyya Arabic
The Tihami Arabic or Tihamiyya dialect has many aspects which differentiate it from all other dialects in the Arab world. Phonologically Tihami is similar to the majority of Yemeni dialects, pronouncing the ' () as and the ' () as a velar plosive (the ' pronunciation is also shared with Egyptian Arabic) unlike San'ani and Hadhrami Arabic which pronounce the ' () as . Grammatically all Tihami dialects also share the unusual feature of replacing the definite article ("al-") with the prefix ("am-"). The future tense, much like the dialects surrounding Sanaa, is indicated with the prefix ("š-"), for all persons, e.g. "ša-būk am-sūq" "I will go to the Souq". Some Tihami dialects, such as that spoken in Al-Hodeida, are otherwise fairly similar to other Yemeni dialects in grammar and syntax, differing mainly in vocabulary, while others can be so far from any other Arabic dialect that they are practically incomprehensible even to other Yemenis.
Egyptian Arabic
The Western Egyptian Bedawi Arabic variety of the western desert differs from all other Arabic varieties in Egypt in that it linguistically is part of Maghrebi Arabic. The same was formerly true of the Egyptian form of Judaeo-Arabic. Northwest Arabian Arabic is also distinct from Egyptian Arabic.
Arabic language in Israel
In March 2007, the Knesset approved a new law calling for the establishment of an Arabic Language Academy similar to the Academy of the Hebrew Language. This institute was established in 2008, its center is in Haifa and it is currently headed by Prof. Mahmud Ghanayem.
Arabic definite article
Finally, in some Semitic languages like Hebrew, words that include the letter lāmed have Arabic cognates that replace it with a Mīm as opposed to Lām, the equivalent letter. For example, skull in Hebrew is גֻּלְגֹּלֶת (gulgolet). Its Arabic cognate is جمجمة (jumjúmah). This gives plausibility to the case of Banu Hamīr and indicates that lām is frequently equated with Mīm.
Kinnui
Among Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic names were adopted, such as Ḥassan, Abdallah, Sahl; or Hebrew names were translated into Arabic, for example, Eleazar into Manẓur, Ovadia into Abdallah, Maẓliaḥ into Maimun. "Ibn" (analogous to the Hebrew "ben") was used to form a family name. Examples of this formula are Ibn Aknin, Ibn Danan, Ibn Laṭif. In the Jews of Arab lands a linguistic mixing happened and names appear with both Hebrew and Arabic elements in the same name, for example, Abraham Ibn Ezra. A peculiarity of the Arabic names is the kunyah, the by-name given to a father after the birth of his son, by which the father is named after the son (using the prefix "Abu"). For example Abu al-Walid is a kunyah for the father of a son named Jonah. "Abu" also forms family names, as in the case of Abudarham, or Aboab. The Arabic article "al" appears in quite a number of names, as in Al-Ḥarisi.
Arabic definite article
While the Proto-Semitic language did not have any articles, the most likely theory is that the article "al"- comes from the same proto-Semitic source as the Hebrew definite article "ha-". That theory is based primarily on the fact that the two share many similarities. Both particles are prefixed to nouns, and both geminate with certain following letters. Moreover, neither particle is prefixed to non-final nouns in a genitival construction. Finally, both are prefixed to relative clauses. According to David Testen, many northern and southwestern Semitic languages have particles that bear similarities to "al"-. With this fact, he posits that "al"- has a proto-Semitic antecedent.
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew has loanwords from Arabic (both from the local Levantine dialect and from the dialects of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries), Aramaic, Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, English and other languages. Simultaneously, Israeli Hebrew makes use of words that were originally loanwords from the languages of surrounding nations from ancient times: Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian. Mishnaic Hebrew borrowed many nouns from Aramaic, as well as some from Greek. In the Middle Ages, liturgical Hebrew borrowed heavily from Spanish, Greek, and Arabic. Some typical examples of Hebrew loanwords are:
Verb–subject–object
Both Spanish and Greek resemble Semitic languages such as Arabic in allowing for both VSO and SVO structures: "Jesús vino el jueves"/"Vino Jesús el jueves, "Tu madre dice que no vayas"/"Dice tu madre que no vayas".
Arabic language in Israel
The Arabic language in Israel is spoken natively by a large proportion of the population, reaching over 20 percent of the total population, mainly by the Arab citizens of Israel and among the Arabic-speaking Jews from the Arab world. Some refer to the modern Hebrew-influenced Levantine Arabic vernacular, spoken by many Israeli Arabs, as the "Israeli Arabic dialect".
Arabic definite article
The Arabic word "hādhā" is equivalent to the Hebrew word זה "zé". It appears that over time Hebrew shortened the demonstrative pronoun hazé ("eikh korím layéled hazé?" or What's this boy's name?) to simply "zé". That indicates that the Hebrew "ha-" was the accurate retention of the original proto-Semitic source, as opposed to "al-", which cannot conclusively be linked to the ancient cognate demonstrative pronoun "hādhā/hazé".
Hejazi Arabic
Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic ( '), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken in the Hejaz region, one by the urban population, originally spoken in the major cities of Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and another by the Bedouin or rural populations. However, the term most often applies to the urban variety which is discussed in this article.
Hebrew language
The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to a distinct style of philosophical Hebrew. This is used in the translations made by the Ibn Tibbon family. (Original Jewish philosophical works were usually written in Arabic.) Another important influence was Maimonides, who developed a simple style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code, the Mishneh Torah. Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and the Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud.