---
title: "Innovation and neologism in modern Hebrew — Yannai 1982"
description: "Yannai (Technion and the Academy of the Hebrew Language) explains how Modern Hebrew found its vocabulary in the century after Ben-Yehuda."
authors: ["Yig'al Yannai"]
year: 1982
venue: "Proceedings of Translating and the Computer: Term banks for tomorrow's world"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/1982.tc-1.7/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yannai-1982-innovation-neologism-modern-hebrew/"
---
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# Innovation and neologism in modern Hebrew

**Authors:** Yig'al Yannai · **Year:** 1982 · **Venue:** Proceedings of Translating and the Computer: Term banks for tomorrow's world **Link:** [aclanthology.org/1982.tc-1.7](https://aclanthology.org/1982.tc-1.7/) · library `lingbulk-1982-yannai-innovation-neologism-modern-hebrew` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[Proceedings of Translating and the Computer: Term banks for tomorrow's world](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/1982.tc-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/1982.tc-1.7/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/1982.tc-1.7.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. Yannai, Yig'al [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2124413352)

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, ; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## 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](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/08-lexicon-register/). I2 goes into [languages/he/04-nouns-adjectives-pronouns.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/04-nouns-adjectives-pronouns/) and [languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms/). I3 goes into [languages/he/05-verbs.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/05-verbs/). I4 is a measurement to note in [languages/he/10-historical-layers.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/10-historical-layers/).

Topics[Hebrew & Aramaic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/hebrew-aramaic/) · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/)

## Cite

Cite as Yig'al Yannai. 1982. Innovation and neologism in modern Hebrew. Proceedings of Translating and the Computer: Term banks for tomorrow's world.

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

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

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