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Language: Hebrew

  • Apr 23, 2012
  • 08:09 PM

Gaza's Hamas rulers to introduce Hebrew

Fox News
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – A senior Hamas official in Gaza says the territory's militant rulers intend to begin teaching Hebrew for high school students beginning next year. Ziad Thabet, the education ministry undersecretary, said Monday the government is trying to find and train teachers.
  • Apr 23, 2012
  • 05:25 PM

Next year in Hebrew

Abby Wisse Schachter / The Jewish Chronicle
Hebrew is the Jewish people’s religious language and its national language. To understand Hebrew is to be permanently linked to the Jewish past, present and future. Problem is, few American Jews know Hebrew and fewer still recognize that this ignorance is a problem.
  • Apr 18, 2012
  • 10:49 AM

Why My Daughter Isn't Bilingual — Yet

Deborah Kolben / The Forward
When Mika was born, my husband and I decided that we wanted her to be bilingual. My husband’s parents are Israeli immigrants, and he was born in this country shortly after they arrived. Until he went to school, Hebrew was his only language. (My Hebrew is limited to what I learned in Hebrew school, which, unfortunately, wasn’t much.)
  • Apr 13, 2012
  • 03:52 PM

Should Israeli Science Speak Hebrew?

Nathan Jeffay / The Forward
Israeli scholarship is widely cited the world over. But if state linguists have their way, much of that research will become a whole lot less accessible to those who don’t speak Hebrew. The Academy of the Hebrew Language is asking the Education Ministry to require universities to use less English — the language in which many graduate-level courses are taught, and in which much of Israel’s scientific research is conducted.
  • Apr 10, 2012
  • 11:05 PM

Call to protect dying Indigenous languages (audio)

Nance Haxton / ABC Online
Linguists say there is a critical need to preserve Indigenous Australian languages that are in danger of dying out. Research shows that up to 90 per cent of the world's 7,000 languages could be lost by the end of the century. Of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, only 20 from of an original 250 are still widely spoken.
  • Apr 10, 2012
  • 05:01 PM

'There is no new Hebrew without ancient Hebrew'

Nir Hasson / Haaretz
The digitization of old texts has become fairly common - for instance, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently announced it was expanding the digital version of its Einstein archives - but, in something of a switch for the Internet era, the Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language is aiming for greater comprehensiveness than researchers say computers can yield.
  • Apr 06, 2012
  • 12:05 AM

Hebrew language, key in Israel education

Paula Jabobs / Jerusalem Post
But to achieve lasting success, Israel education must emphasize Hebrew language skills. Nothing binds us to Israel like the Hebrew language. I still remember the exhilaration of speaking Hebrew on my first visit to Israel many years ago. However, what percentage of American Jewish young people can conduct a conversation in Hebrew, understand an Israeli radio or television broadcast, or read an Israeli newspaper?
  • Mar 28, 2012
  • 02:52 PM

New Languages Democratising Social Media in the Middle East

Journal of Turkish Weekly
Digital communication, as a way to share information and debate ideas, is now central to many parts of life. One prominent example is the focus on online activity in contentious political activities. Twitter and similar networks have been hailed as important tools of communication and organisation for opposition movements to authoritarian regimes.
  • Mar 21, 2012
  • 07:33 PM

In which brain do you read?

University of Haifa
Readers whose mother tongue is Arabic have more challenges reading in Arabic than native Hebrew or English speakers have reading their native languages, because the two halves of the brain divide the labor differently when the brain processes Arabic than when it processes Hebrew or English.
  • Mar 20, 2012
  • 07:27 PM

UK journalists held in Libya after Welsh mistaken for Hebrew (video)

BBC News
A Welsh journalist who was detained in Libya says his captors thought he was an Israeli spy because they confused the Welsh language with Hebrew. Gareth Montgomery-Johnson is back home in Nantgaredig, near Carmarthen. He was carrying medical supplies with Welsh words on them when he was arrested in Tripoli last month.
  • Mar 15, 2012
  • 09:01 PM

Jewish, Muslim scribes keep calligraphy art alive

Bernat Armangue / Seattle Post Intelligencer
JERUSALEM — In a world overwhelmed by electronic gadgets that have changed the way we read, write and learn, the Jewish and Islamic arts of calligraphy have preserved their methods for generations.
  • Mar 15, 2012
  • 08:23 PM

Digital spell-checking may be killing off words

Charles Choi / msnbc.com
The death rate of words has apparently increased recently while new entries into languages are becoming less common, both perhaps because of digital spell-checking, according to a Google-aided analysis of more than 10 million words. More than 4 percent of the world's books have now been digitized, a trove that includes seven languages and dates back to the 16th century. All of this text offers new opportunities to study how language evolves.
  • Mar 11, 2012
  • 01:15 PM

How does God's word sound? May depend on translation

John Przybys / Las Vegas Review - Journal
"I've been asked repeatedly if the translations I've worked on are translations of the King James, for example, assuming a translation from English to English," said Green, who also is New Testament editor of the Common English Bible, released in 2011. "So when I explain that it is a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic, in a few cases, and Greek, people are surprised and they wonder if Bible scholars actually know those languages."
  • Mar 08, 2012
  • 05:45 PM

Translating Twitter into languages read right to left isn't easy

Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times
Twitter now comes in 28 languages. The newest ones -- Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic and Urdu -- were added just this week. Those four languages posed a particular problem to Twitter's team of translation volunteers because they are read from right to left, rather than left to right. Therefore the translation required not just word challenges, but technical and design challenges too.
  • Mar 07, 2012
  • 12:51 AM

Twitter Moves Right-To-Left, Adds Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu

Josh Wolford / WebProNews
In January, Twitter added four new right-to-left languages to their Translation Center, the crowdsourcing project that allows users from multiple different languages to help translate Twitter (the service, not the actual tweets). Now, they’ve announced that the work is complete and you can now interact with Twitter in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu.
  • Mar 07, 2012
  • 12:48 AM

In Hebrew's revival, a Nordic people see hope

Daniella Cheslow / The Associated Press
JERUSALEM (AP) — Norway's Sami people, an indigenous community with roots as reindeer herders in the northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia, are looking south to Israel for help preserving their fading native language. A Sami delegation spent five days in Israel recently, hoping the Jewish state's experience reviving the once-dormant ancient Hebrew language can provide a blueprint for them.
  • Mar 04, 2012
  • 03:20 PM

Bringing Hebrew to Kashmir

Nafeesa Syeed / The Wall Street Journal
SRINAGAR, India – Down the road from the knot of houseboats floating in Srinagar’s Nigeen Lake, two Internet cafes are changing the script. To Hebrew, that is.
  • Feb 29, 2012
  • 09:18 PM

Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language declares war – on English

Talila Nesher / Haaretz
The academy called on Sa'ar to annul any ban on the use of Hebrew at any university or college department around the country. "That in the State of Israel there could be such a ban against Hebrew, as in the dark days of our people's existence, is inconceivable," said the academy.
  • Feb 13, 2012
  • 04:07 PM

Sheffield's dictionary triumph

Simon Rocker / The Jewish Chronicle Online
What has been billed as the first Dictionary of Classical Hebrew has been completed by a team of scholars based at Sheffield University. "The only dictionaries there have been are of biblical Hebrew," explained the editor of the eight-volume set, David Clines, emeritus professor of biblical studies at Sheffield. "They didn't include the Dead Sea Scrolls or other Hebrew inscriptions that we have now."
  • Dec 05, 2011
  • 11:23 PM

Language Problem

Kaustuv Basu / Inside Higher Ed
In the weeks and months after 9/11, the talk in the United States was about the need to be better prepared to understand the culture and languages of the Middle East. There was a surge of college students enrolling in Arabic and Persian. More than a decade later, that initial surge is showing signs of slowing down even while the world focuses on the Arab world again as homegrown pro-democracy movements shake up governments in the region.
  • Nov 29, 2011
  • 11:40 AM

Hebrew tweets jump 150%: Israelis tweet three times more often in English than in Hebrew

Roy Goldenberg / Globes
The phenomenal success of Facebook in Israel - with more than 2 million users - has left Twitter and its microblogging behind. It never really succeeded in Israel. The less user-friendly interface, its cliquiness, and also the fact that Twitter was not translated into Hebrew - all of these apparently became obstacles to the success Twitter experienced overseas.
  • Nov 17, 2011
  • 03:50 PM

All Greek to them: classics back in vogue as schools embrace languishing languages

Rachel Olding / Camden Advertiser
The classics are enjoying a revival in NSW high schools and universities, reflecting a similar trend in England where Boris Johnson's Latin in London scheme is one of several initiatives to bring classical languages into more lives.
  • Nov 17, 2011
  • 02:58 PM

Language in words few take on board

Stuart Kelly / scotsman.com
It’s well known that Hugh MacDiarmid, the genius poet who did more than anyone to resurrect Scots as a literary language, was not picky about where his Scots came from. A poem might mix Doric with Borders, and the very name he gave to it – “synthetic Scots” – contains both the idea of synthesis and the idea of artificiality.
  • Aug 26, 2011
  • 02:36 PM

Hebrew Immersion Another Option at Charter Schools

Sarah Wildman / Forward
Hebrew is the latest addition in the movement for early foreign-language study in order to promote fluency rather than mere proficiency. After an initial tremor of anxiety over church/state separation — Can Hebrew be taught outside a Jewish context? What is the curriculum in a Hebrew language school if not Bible? — the idea is taking hold.
  • Aug 10, 2011
  • 05:14 PM

Israeli nursing school rescinds ban on speaking Russian and Arabic

Jack Khoury / Haaretz
School of Nursing in Ashkelon tells students 'it is absolutely prohibited to conduct a conversation in a foreign language' on school grounds; Health Ministry instructed the school to withdraw the order.
  • Jul 29, 2011
  • 10:59 PM

A stir over sign language

Ofer Aderet / Haaretz
A recently discovered trove of documents from the 1950s reveals a nasty battle in Jerusalem over the hebraization of street and neighborhood names. This campaign is still raging today.
  • Jul 22, 2011
  • 10:27 PM

Bible rewritten using 'the language of today'

Debra Black / Toronto Star
A professor from the Divinity College at McMaster University is one of a group of translators involved in a four-year $3.5 million dollar project to publish a new translation of the Bible. “We were trying to render the text into the language of today,” Cynthia Long Westfall, a professor at McMaster’s Divinity College, told the Star.
  • Jul 21, 2011
  • 11:54 PM

A Hebrew revival

Moshe Sluhovsky / Jerusalem Post
Two historians convincingly make the case that Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon, best known for expertise in Greek and Latin, was an industrious Hebraist.
  • May 26, 2011
  • 01:33 AM

Black and White and Hebrew All Over

Steven Thrasher / Village Voice
Black kids and white kids are sitting together in a building that used to house a private yeshiva. It's not exactly what you'd expect to see when you walk into the Hebrew Language Academy (HLA), a public charter school in the largely Jewish neighborhood where Midwood meets Marine Park.
  • May 23, 2011
  • 12:30 PM

Reviving Hebrew

Mira Sucharov / Huffington Post
There is much hand-wringing over Jewish continuity, but less attention is paid to cultivating serious Jewish literacy. One factor that is especially neglected -- to our peril -- is the centrality of Hebrew language knowledge.
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