A post from languagehat

[conuly]

On Hebrew and Israeli and the differences, if any.

Comments

[appadil.livejournal.com]

For future reference- NEVER make mention of this to most Jews/Israelis/etc unless they're linguistics geeks. I got into a completely overblown argument with my sister's friend thanks to the information in your link, and I had a very strong impression that he wasn't even remotely listening.

[conuly]

Don't worry. I've long since learned that people with no linguistics knowledge whatsoever (as compared to people like me, with a tiny bit of lingusitics knowledge, just barely enough to know what I don't know) hold various ideas about language with religious fervor. Have you heard some of the conversations I've had about prescriptivism? You tell people that living languages change, and that there's no logical reason to say one dialect is better or worse than another, and they act like you told them that there's no God (or that there is and they're going to Hell, whatever).