Curiosity -“RebRy – I say “closest” because there are innovations.
Chazal say the sole reason that Hebrew is considered Kadosh is because it has no words that are inherently vulgar. Modern day Hebrew dialect has to borrow from Arabic, Yiddish, and English to create dirty words. The language is still holy, because the words used by Israelis are just part of the evolving colloquial dialect (read: slang), not part of the actual (non-slang) language.”
I don’t know if you read all the topics in the CR, but we discussed about Ivrit & Yiddish in this topic:
“Enough with Yiddish already:
Please go read all the posts there!
But one post that I wrote there, I’m reposting here:
“Health -I did some research into these languages. Did you know they had this argument in Europe which language should be the Jewish language -Yiddish or Ivrit?
Let me tell you about this guy Ben -Yehuda -he just wasn’t a non-religious guy -he was Anti-religion. He started out as a Frum kid -became a Maskil -then a Zionist.
It seems he wanted a language that people in the street could speak, not just learned Chachomim. This I don’t understand -why can’t they speak LK? So I think he made a language to mock LK. That’s why he decided to put the Sefardi pronunciation to it -to make fun of it (LK). If my hunch is correct, it might be Ossur or definitely preferable Not to speak Ivrit. Some say people who know Ivrit before they learn Torah don’t get the proper meaning of what the Torah means because of the different meanings of Ivrit. When Teddy H. liked the English (British) idea of the Jewish homeland in Uganda, Ben-Yehuda was all for it. I guess this kind of proves he wanted nothing to do with Kedusha. So his language is No offshoot of Kedusha -it had to me mocking the holy language (LK).
Now back to Europe -the Zionists started pushing their Hebrew (Ivrit) there and a lot of Jews didn’t like it. A bunch of Non-Frum intellectual Jews got together in Vilna in the 20’s to counter act this. They started an org. called YIVO to push Yiddish as the Jewish language.
So I should be worse than a bunch of Freye Yidden who saw through what the Tzionim were doing with this Ivrit, and speak this ridiculous language?”