[9] Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence,[10] it became extinct as a spoken language.
By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as a living language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and a distinct Jewish nationality in the context of Zionism.
[15] Currently, Hebrew is spoken by approximately 9–10 million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers.
[16][17] Some 6 million of these speak it as their native language, the overwhelming majority of whom are Jews who were born in Israel or immigrated during infancy.
[23] Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region.
[citation needed] Its acceptance by the early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was caused primarily by support from the organisations of Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and the official status it received in the 1922 constitution of the British Mandate for Palestine.
[33] The word kishū’īm (formerly 'cucumbers')[34] is now applied to a variety of summer squash (Cucurbita pepo var.
Another example is the word kǝvīš (כביש), which now denotes a street or a road, but is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning 'trodden down' or 'blazed', rather than a common noun.
[39][40][41][42] 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,[43][44][page needed] some scholars posit that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state, though this is not the consensus among scholars.
[45] Modern Hebrew is considered to be a koiné language based on historical layers of Hebrew that incorporates 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.
[46][47][48][49] Those theories have not been met with general acceptance, and the consensus among a majority of scholars is that Modern Hebrew, despite its non-Semitic influences, can correctly be classified as a Semitic language.
Modern Hebrew morphology (formation, structure, and interrelationship of words in a language) is essentially Biblical.
In the formation of new words, all verbs and the majority of nouns and adjectives are formed by the classically Semitic devices of triconsonantal roots (shoresh) with affixed patterns (mishkal).
The syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic[52] but also shows the influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed during the revival period and over the past century.
Modern Hebrew has expanded its vocabulary effectively to meet the needs of casual vernacular, of science and technology, of journalism and belles-lettres.
[55] In the Middle Ages, Hebrew made heavy semantic borrowing from Arabic, especially in the fields of science and philosophy.