Oomis, a lot depends on your Rov’s background. Was his PhD in linguistics or a something related? What sort of professional work did he do in the field? What got published in peer-reviewed journals? How was it received? As they say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Did he provide enough and strong enough evidence to overturn the millions of man-years that have gone into our understanding of the history of languages?
Certainly, Jews lived in many parts of the world. But we didn’t live “everywhere”. And many places where we lived already had languages going back a long, long way. Even where there were plenty of Jews, not all of them spoke Hebrew very much. Not many of their neighbors picked up a lot of it.
Consider that the Mourner’s Kaddish and Talmud are in Aramaic because those were the language commonly spoken by Jews in that time and in that place. Insofar as there has been a noticeable effect of Jewish speech on European languages it has mostly been via Ladino or Yiddish which are themselves polyglots including a little Hebrew and a lot of Romance or Germanic bits and pieces.
If your Rov was being careful I’d bet dollars to ham and hold the stakes in my mouth that his thesis was a lot more conservative. Where there were Jews they had an effect on the speech of people around them. Some of this included Hebrew words which made their way – often heavily modified – into the language of the host country. No arguments there. But to say that Hebrew is the basis for any widely spoken non-Semitic language is not supported by the facts. Not in grammar. Not in structure. Not in written language. Not in vocabulary. Even Yiddish is much more an extremely Platt form of Deutsch than it is Hebrew.
My Rabbi has excellent advice on Torah, how to keep kosher, how to be a good Jew and – rarer and just as important – how to be a good husband and a decent human being. I listen to what he says. But when it comes to reconfiguring a router or doing cluster analysis on statistical data I’m better equipped by training and obsession.
Or to drag it back to the subject at hand Every cat his own rat
And that’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject. If you’d like to continue the discussion we can start a thread elsewhere. Or I give permission to the Moderators to give you my email address so we can take it off line.