Yoel Sheridan wrote: >> I am currently researching Jewish life in mediaeval England where it appears that Jews communicated with each other in written Hebrew. Did they also speak it? <<
It seems that in some areas, Hebrew was spoken enough for more than a few Hebrew phrases to become English idioms. This method of idiom formation via Phono-Semantic Matching is described at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2033458/Hebrew/Idiom_Formation_via_Transliteration.docx More examples are illustrated at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2033458/Hebrew/Idioms.doc Hebrew was also understood by erudite members of the Christian community. For example, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) spoke all of the languages mentioned in his poem, *The Hunting of the Snark*. The tragic hero of this poem is a Jewish baker who says: "I said it in Hebrew – I said it in Dutch – I said it in German and Greek: But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!" You can read this poem with Martin Gardner's commentary at http://www.scribd.com/doc/110512434/The-Annotated-Hunting-of-the-Snark English also had contact with Phoenician, a very similar Western Semitic language. The Phoenicians obtained tin from Cornwall, England. Over 3000 years ago, the Phoenicians used anthropomorphic maps whose toponyms were derived from the names of body-parts. You can see a list of body-part - toponym pairs on their maps of the Middle East and North Africa at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2033458/Body_Part_Maps/BodyPartList_3.doc Best regards, Izzy Israel A Cohen Beer Sheva [email protected]
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