Perhaps you mixed me up with someone else.
I am a bit more optimistic about the relation of
modern Hebrew to Biblical Hebrew - it is much
stronger than some assume. Of course, a speaker of
the biblical language won't understand the modern,
but he would understand current words like Bayit
or Hayom, even though pronounced a bit differently.
Incidentally, the late Max Ellenbogen once pointed
out to me: there is no doubt that a word like Kalbi
(my dog) had the same meaning and was
pronounced the same way for thousands of years.
Without some knowledge of cognate
languages it is hard to understand why masculine
sounding biblical words like Esh (fire), or
EZ (goat) are femninine; nor why there is a Nun
in the plural of Bat (daughter) etc.
Uri Hurwitz
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