Innovation and neologism in modern Hebrew

What it is about

Yannai (Technion and the Academy of the Hebrew Language) explains how Modern Hebrew found its vocabulary in the century after Ben-Yehuda. New words came from two sources: classical Hebrew literature and Aramaic, and Hebrew's own word formation, in which a root is fitted into a pattern it was not in before, or is augmented, or a denominative root is made. Foreign words were either adapted to Hebrew patterns (verbs are fitted into the seven binyanim) or kept in their international form. The Academy's procedure runs from a platform of basic terms, through two calls for comment and a check against existing glossaries, to a terminology committee, a grammar session and the Plenum, and approved terms are published in the official gazette. By 1982 a computerised index held about 60,000 terms with English equivalents. The author's view is that grammar and phraseology, not vocabulary, decide a language's health, and he gives the native share of a daily newspaper as 70% to 80% of its words.

Ideas

• I1. Duplicate check before coining: the Academy searches all earlier glossaries so as not to create needless synonyms. Build the same check for new lemmas against the lexicon and the field lists, and flag same-meaning or same-form entries as a rule-based test.
• I2. Root-and-pattern table: list each root against every pattern, marking attested, archaic and empty cells. The empty cells are the candidate coinages, a finite and checkable set for the noun and verb generators.
• I3. Loan verbs: foreign verbs are fitted into one of the seven patterns, while nouns keep foreign shapes. Write this as a rule (loan stem in a binyan, consonants only) and test it on the paper's own examples, such as the verb for "pasteurise" and the one for "polymerised".
• I4. Measure the native-versus-loan token share on a current Hebrew corpus and compare it with the 70–80% figure from 1982, as a dated reference number.

For Mova

I1 goes into languages/he/08-lexicon-register.md. I2 goes into languages/he/04-nouns-adjectives-pronouns.md and languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms.md. I3 goes into languages/he/05-verbs.md. I4 is a measurement to note in languages/he/10-historical-layers.md.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{yannai1982innovation,
  title = {{Innovation and neologism in modern Hebrew}},
  author = {Yannai, Yig'al},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Translating and the Computer: Term banks for tomorrow's world},
  year = {1982},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/1982.tc-1.7/}
}