cursing in Hebrew
The latest post on Language Log quotes an article from the New Yorker about Jewish settlers in the West Bank, then says:
And these young Hebrew-speaking men...had taken the trouble to learn enough Arabic to howl their filth in their victims' native language.
I don't think that's exactly what's going on here. From what I understand, modern Hebrew uses swear words which are originally derived from Arabic. This is a rather unusual borrowing relationship for two languages to be in, and there seem to be lots of theories floating around about why this is so. Some are pretty silly ("God's Language must not be sullied with curses" and so forth) but the most plausible-sounding one to me is that it is because Modern Hebrew was reconstructed from Biblical sources, and so they couldn't reconstruct what the swear words should be because there aren't any in the Bible. So the Israelis borrowed them from nearby Arabic-speaking Palestinians. Although why they ended up borrowing these words instead of just adapting native words meaning `excrement' and so forth for the purpose is unclear to me...also, I wonder if any native Hebrew curses were preserved in Yiddish, Ladino, etc.? And if not, why not?
Anyway, I would've posted a comment about this there, but Language Log doesn't allow commenting on their entries, I guess so that they don't have to worry about spam. (Although it seems somewhat pointless to me to have a blog without allowing comments...)
And these young Hebrew-speaking men...had taken the trouble to learn enough Arabic to howl their filth in their victims' native language.
I don't think that's exactly what's going on here. From what I understand, modern Hebrew uses swear words which are originally derived from Arabic. This is a rather unusual borrowing relationship for two languages to be in, and there seem to be lots of theories floating around about why this is so. Some are pretty silly ("God's Language must not be sullied with curses" and so forth) but the most plausible-sounding one to me is that it is because Modern Hebrew was reconstructed from Biblical sources, and so they couldn't reconstruct what the swear words should be because there aren't any in the Bible. So the Israelis borrowed them from nearby Arabic-speaking Palestinians. Although why they ended up borrowing these words instead of just adapting native words meaning `excrement' and so forth for the purpose is unclear to me...also, I wonder if any native Hebrew curses were preserved in Yiddish, Ladino, etc.? And if not, why not?
Anyway, I would've posted a comment about this there, but Language Log doesn't allow commenting on their entries, I guess so that they don't have to worry about spam. (Although it seems somewhat pointless to me to have a blog without allowing comments...)