Advantages of Vocabulary of European Origin for Learning Modern Hebrew

Latin and Greek are important donor languages to Hebrew, which does not belong to the Indo-European but Semitic language family. The present study conducted a vocabulary survey to examine the advantage of frequently used Modern Hebrew vocabulary of European origin and their English equivalents for learning Modern Hebrew as a foreign language. The Oxford 3000 list was used as the primary reference of high-frequency English words and their Hebrew equivalents. As a result, 186 loanwords of Latin or Greek origin are included in the most frequently used 3,000 Hebrew words and approximately 150 loanwords can be used with a similar pronunciation in English and Italian. Therefore, the present study concluded that knowledge of high-frequency Hebrew vocabulary of Greek or Latin origin could assist speakers of English and Italian in learning Modern Hebrew.


The Creation of Modern Vocabulary in Hebrew
Hebrew belongs to the Semitic language family (Crystal, 2010). Because of frequent invasions by the Roman Empire, Jewish people lost their initial home state and could not have their own country for almost 1,900 years. During this period, Hebrew was mainly used for liturgical purposes such as collective and individual prayers and practice of religious customs. However, in the 19th century, linguists such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda started revitalizing Hebrew by enriching vocabulary and standardizing its grammar as a living modern language.
Majority of Modern Hebrew neologisms were created based on original Hebrew vocabulary elements (Sáenz-Badillos, 1996): machshev (computer) from the verb lachshov (to think) and matos (plane) from the verb latus (to fly). Other words related to modern life are compounds of two vocabulary items. For instance, the Hebrew noun nemal-te'ufa (airport) consists of namal (port) and te'ufa (aviation) (Sivan and Levenston, 2009), and the noun beitcholim (hospital) consisting of beit (house) and cholim (patients) includes a structure similar to its German equivalents Krankenhaus (hospital) that comprises Kranken (patients) and Haus (house) (Clark and Thyen, 2013).

Loanwords of European Origin
However, Modern Hebrew also contains many loanwords of European origin, such as ambulans (ambulance), bank (bank), mapa (map), sport (sport), and supermarket (supermarket). The Hebrew kontsert (concert), Yanuar (January), and Februar (February) retain German or Yiddish pronunciations, e.g., the German Konzert (concert) (Clark and Thyen, 2013). The English suffix -tion corresponds to -tsya in Hebrew which was mainly borrowed through Russian because a large Jewish diaspora existed in the Slavic countries. For example, the Hebrew reputatsya (reputation) mostly retains the pronunciation of the Russian noun ryeputatsya (Thompson, 2013). Moreover, loanwords of French origin are, for instance, roman (novel) and biskvit (biscuit), whose ultimate origin is Latin (Oxford Dictionaries, 2013). Therefore, those with basic vocabulary knowledge in English or another European language may learn these Hebrew words with ease. Additionally, many academic terms in Hebrew are loanwords of Latin or Greek origin because they convey precise concepts.

Loan Translation in Finnish and Hungarian
Finnish and Estonian are two European languages that do not belong to the Indo-European language family but rather to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. The Finnish noun lentoasema (airport) consists of lento (flight) and asema (station). Its form is completely different from Latin-based words, such as airport in English and its Italian equivalent aeroporto. However, the Finnish word may have been created through loan translation from other European languages (Sanders, 2017). An example with a similar composition is the Swedish flygplats (airport) consisting of flyg (flight) and plats (place, square) (Hille, 2011). The Swedish sjukhus (hospital) includes sjuk (sick, ill) and hus (house) (Hille, 2011).
Hungarian is another Uralic language that created thousands of modern vocabulary items using loan translation. For instance, the Hungarian noun kórház (hospital) consists of kór (disease) and ház (house) (Szabó, 2005). The structure is similar to that of its German equivalent because Hungary was part of the Austrian Empire for centuries (Molnár, 2001). Other Hungarian compounds are könyvtár (library) comprising könyv (book) and tár (storehouse) and szótár (dictionary) that includes szó (word) and tár (storehouse). In addition, repülőtér (airport) consists of the radical repül-(to fly) and tér (square). These Hungarian words demonstrate a linguistic independence from influential European languages such as English and German. The use of original vocabulary elements for loan translation enabled Hungarians to strengthen their ethnic identity. However, those purified words frequently impede Hungarian learning by foreigners and even ethnically Hungarian people outside Hungary, who are studying Hungarian as a heritage language.
This study will not discuss the importance of linguistic identity but will rather focus on the benefits of shared loanwords among several languages for language learners.

Objective
The objective of this study is to propose an effective method of learning Modern Hebrew vocabulary of Greek or Latin origin. The method is primarily oriented to English and Italian speakers who are interested in learning basic Hebrew. However, the findings of this study will also benefit speakers of Spanish and Portuguese because these languages also include many words of Latin and Greek origins. The primary reference for Latin vocabulary is The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary (Morwood, 2005).

Benefits of Cognates for Language Learning
Nation and Webb (2011) suggest the benefits of using English words that share the same origin in teaching English vocabulary. They exemplify revise, visual, and vision. These words originate from videre (to see) in Latin (Stevenson and Waite, 2011). Through focusing on words of the same origin, learners will become more aware of semantic associations among them. Ringbom (2007) also advocates the utility of cognates, defined as "historically related, morphologically similar words, whose meanings may be identical, similar, or partly different," when teaching and learning foreign languages. Everson (2011) conducted a comprehensive review of recent studies focused on the teaching of Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Mandarin, all of which have non-Latin writing systems. His study emphasizes the importance of developing the ability to exploit the semantic elements of the characters from an early learning stage as this skill enables learners to efficiently recognize and infer the meanings of unknown words (p. 263). It was also stressed that by improving their recognition of each character's semantic components, learners can more easily remember the characters than through rote memorization (p. 264). (Laufer and Shmueli, 1997) compared the benefits of several different ways to demonstrate the meanings of selected English vocabulary. The participants were Israeli university students learning English as a foreign language. The researchers provided the experimental group with vocabulary lists and single sentences with first-language translations while the texts distributed to the control group comprised only definitions or synonyms in English. Their research concluded that providing first-language translations enabled the participants to retain the selected vocabulary better, and that giving definitions or synonyms in a second language contributed less to their vocabulary learning. The learners' first language could convey far higher quality information or knowledge for vocabulary learning than the target language could.

Materials and Methods
In this study, the primary reference for high-frequency English words was the Oxford 3000 TM , a list of approximately 3,000 basic words used to define entry words in the Oxford Dictionary. The author of this study counted Hebrew words of Latin or Greek origin in the scope of the Hebrew equivalents of the English list. The selected Hebrew words were then sorted according to their origins. The first category was vocabulary of Latin origin. The second was that of Greek origin.

Results
In total, 186 words of Latin or Greek origin were included in this study's list of basic Hebrew vocabulary equivalents to the most frequently used 3,000 English words. This number of loanwords was equal to 6.2% of the total number of words in basic Hebrew vocabulary. The total number of Latin loanwords was 122 (e.g., virus "virus" and ambitsya "ambition"), and that of Greek loanwords was 64 (e.g., energya "energy" and kategorya "category").

Hebrew Words Ending in -a
The Hebrew words in Table 1 end with the vowel a, and they derive from Classical Greek or Latin. The English and Italian equivalents retain similarity and most frequently end with -y and -ia, respectively, originating from theia ending in Classical Latin. For example, the final vowel of the Latin categoria (category) changes to -y in English. The listed Hebrew words ending with -ika correspond to the English and Italian words with similar endings. In addition, alergya (allergy), galerya (gallery), fantazya (fantasy), and harmonya (harmony) are other Hebrew examples that include the -ya ending, although they are not included in the Oxford word list.
The listed Italian words all end with an a that has remained since the period of Classical Latin. Many of these words are frequently used in basic communication in English and Italian. For example, the Latin theoria (theory) becomes teorya (theory) in Hebrew and teoria (theory) in Italian. This regular correspondence between Hebrew and Italian would help Hebrew-speaking learners of Latin-based languages, who have the fundamental English vocabulary knowledge.