"and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible": That is the definition of a dialect.

Also, I don't know how you can claim Hebrew is phonetically represented by its alphabet rather than the other way around, as a revived language the pronunciations are largely a matter of convention based on Yiddish. It would be more accurate to say that modern Hebrew uses an ancient writing system, which happens to be closely related to the ancestor of modern European alphabets.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

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yellowapple an hour ago | parent [-]

> That is the definition of a dialect.

I dunno, some English dialects don't seem particularly intelligible to me, and I'm a natively fluent speaker of it.

	▲	QuiDortDine an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is like speciation but for languages: there's no "ah-ha!" moment, but we know a lemur can't produce viable offsprings with a zebra. Likewise we know Italian isn't French even though some words are kinda similar. If you want to be technical about it, it's a spectrum: I understand British people and people from the American deep South, but it's far from certain they will understand each other. Hard to be precise with social sciences. That said, two people who understand each other are, by any reasonable definition, speaking dialects of the same tongue (if not, obviously, the very same dialect).