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vkazanov 6 hours ago

Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.

Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.

A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.

Muromec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.

Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.

rgblambda 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago.

I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?

Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.

nephihaha 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.

vkazanov 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No idea. But vocabulary and grammar are mostly orthogonal.