By coincidence, I am reading a book by an Israeli linguist, Ghil'ad Zuckermann called Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. He covers the various ways that Israelis have coped with a language that lacked many terms for everyday and modern objects. One process he writes about is camoulflaged borrowing, where words are dervied from German, Russian, Yiddish, and English words but by a sort of folk etymological process that tries to disguise the fact of a foreign loanword by clothing it with a Semitic root. Sometimes these sources are multiple, e.g., Israeli karpada 'toad' "from" French crapaud 'toad' and Aramaic qurpda 'an unknown kind of animal'. Sometimes the words are calques (or loan translations) like gan yeladim 'kindergarden'.

As for differing pronunciations of Hebrew, there are at least five that I am aware of: Tiberian, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Yemenite, and Israeli. I'm sure there are more.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.