The Case of Israeli: Multisourced Neologization (MSN) as an Ideal Technique for Lexical Enrichment

Abstract

Hebrew, used by Jews since the thirteenth century BC, ceased to be spoken during the second century ad. For more than 1700 years thereafter, it served as a liturgical and literary language for Jews of the Diaspora. Although it was occasionally also employed as a lingua franca it was not in use as a mother tongue. Israeli emerged in Eretz Yisrael (Palestine) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the variety of scholarly opinion about the genetics of Israeli (cf. Zuckermann 200la), there should be a consensus on the following points: (i) Hebrew suffered from a severe lexical paucity; (ii) Israeli has been strongly influenced by various languages which belong to different language families due to the cosmopolitan nature of Israeli society; (iii) Israeli has been supported ideologically in order to strengthen the Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael (cf. Tur-Sinai 1960: 9, Wexler 1990: 13). Thus, Israeli might be regarded as a ‘reinvented language’ in which purists had to work hard to coin new words using native elements to replace those of alien pedigree. MSN is the ideal means for such neologization for the following reasons:

• 1. For the native speaker of the future: camouflaging foreign influence (using autochthonous constituents)

• 2. For the ‘revivalist’: recycling obsolete lexemes

• 3. For the contemporary learner/speaker (until the beginning of the twentieth century, a non-native speaker): facilitating initial learning (mnemonization)