Thread by @arabic_bad

I still am not quite sure how this stupid thought-meme originated, but it couldn't be farther from the truth of the actual story of Arabic words in Hebrew. Thread....

There *were* people during the Hebrew revival (incl. Ben Yehuda himself) who strongly advocated for incorporation of Arabic loans & neologisms derived from Arabic roots, but the actual impact of those efforts amounts to little in Hebrew as it actually exists and is used today.

As I never tire of pointing out, there are way more English and Frenchloanwords in the language of an Israeli newspaper than Arabic loans.

Most Arabic loanwords in Hebrew (they aren't hard to find) do not originate in modern language planning efforts. They are of two forms.

(1) Colloquialisms borrowed from spoken Arabic. These are especially common in coarse, obscene and generally slangy registers of Hebrew.

Thus in modern Modern Hebrew there are words like מסטול “stoned”, כוס “cunt”, איכס "ew, yuck", מג׳נון "psycho", פרחה “bimbo”, שרמוטה "slut", ערס "chav, cholo, douchebag" which are borrowed directly from spoken Arabic.

Not all such loanwords are necessarily nasty or crude. But they tend to be colloquial. For example נגלה "run" (in the sense of one of many repeated trips like "I made a couple runs into town for supplies") which was borrowed from نقلة via an Arabic dialect with gāf.

Another is בוסה "a smooch" borrowed directly from spoken Arabic, and which exists as a slangy word for kiss alongside the more standard inherited נשיקה which is attested in the Bible.

These colloquial Arabic loans were not planned. No committee greenlit them. They did not make Hebrew language-planners (who were quite purism-prone) especially happy. The predilection for low-register loans is not limited to Arabic either. They abound from Russian & Yiddish too.

This also is not something only Hebrew does. Icelandic uses English loans in the same way at coarser and slangier levels of speech, like the word "fok" which means exactly what you think it does.

It seems to me that languages with (a) highly institutionalized and puristic regulatory bodies and (b) heavy levels of multilingualism in the speaker community are especially prone to loans at levels of speech that institutions cannot control.

To find more high-register Hebrew terms loaned from Arabic you need to look to a time when modern institutions weren't around to put their thumb on the scale. This brings me to:

(2) Arabic loanwords that are quite old in Hebrew. By that I mean almost a thousand years old. This includes a broad range of things including many everyday words like אקלים "region", אופק "horizon", מרכז "center", צליל "tone" and הנדסה "engineering".

These words arrived in Hebrew from Arabic many centuries ago when Hebrew was not a vernacular. They were effected mostly by writers who were native Arabic speakers, and often as part of translation efforts.

The real history of Arabic influence on Hebrew is fascinating and it runs deeper than what I've touched on in this thread. As someone who loves both of these languages I find it endlessly rewarding to learn about, and bullshit groupthink memes like those of OP rather irritating.

Addendum: sometimes people think a word in Hebrew is loaned from Arabic when it is a cognate. A great example is the word for "shit" חרא. This word is not just a good old Semitic word w/ an Ugaritic cognate, but is actually attested in the Bible. (Further nerd thread below)

Its obscenity was sensed early on, and a tradition arose (at least in the Mishnaic period but probably much earlier) of substituting a less nasty word in liturgical reading.

At 2 Kings 18:27 we find in the consonantal text

לאכל את חריהם ולשתות את־שיניהם עמכם

A somewhat nasty tone is appropriate to the context, and it probably isn't all that wrong to translate this as:

"...will have to eat their own shit and drink their own piss like you".

But the reader in liturgy is required to read it as if it said

לאכל את צואתם ולשתות את־מימי רגליהם עמכם

"....will have to eat their own egesta and drink their own intercrural fluids like you"

Bleeding out the crudity is just one of many uses to which the qere/ktiv phenomenon is put in the liturgical performance of the Biblical text. But I find it an especially amusing one. Ok here endeth the spergy nerding.

Wait I'm not done yet. There *are* individuals who have deliberately used Arabic loans in Hebrew literature in order to make a point. A great example is the poet Avot Yeshurun (1926–2007).

Yeshurun was famous/notorious for this kind of thing, freely throwing in Palestinian Arabic words and phrases in his writing, w/ a particular predilection for Arabic-Hebrew puns, to the point where you sometimes need to know Levantine Arabic to appreciate his work

Like the point he makes in using a loanword like "falasṭīn" פלסטין (rhyming with פלאחין "fellāḥīn") in a famous (and famously difficult) poem openly commenting on Palestinian trauma is not subtle, nor meant to be.

Yeshurun was born in Poland and immigrating to Mandatory Palestine in 1934, his early life was marked by the turbulence of the pre-state period in Israel. He spent years roaming both Jewish and Arab villages, doing oddjobs.

His poetry is dense and odd, full of odd usages and deliberate violations of language norms, and his sympathy toward the local Arab Palestinian population ran deep.

He wrote "it wasn't Herzl or Weizman who brought me to the land of Israel but the Arab docker who brought me from the ship to Jaffa's shore". Identification between Arab and Jew underlies a good bit of his verse, which sometimes turns itself inside out with sadness.

I mention this is because it highlights the irony of alleging there is something deligitimizingly impure about Arabic words in Israeli Hebrew, as that position winds up in agreement more with those planners who controlled the institutions, and at odds with someone like Yeshurun.