Do Hebrew speakers understand anything?

[u/FeistyAlbatross4636]

https://youtube.com/shorts/YUEM98uoSIE?si=X9W4CeqeSSSzuCfD

[u/EconomyDue2459]

Few words. Beyond her very anglicized pronunciation making it difficult, it's important to understand that Akkadian is probably the farthest you can get from Hebrew in terms of Semitic languages, as Akkadian is East Semitic, while every other Semitic language (except Eblaite, another extinct East Semitic language) is West Semitic.

[u/Weak-Doughnut5502 → u/EconomyDue2459]

In particular, Semitic languages were one common dialect around 3900 BCE, and Akkadian itself was spoken around 2500 BCE.  The earliest texts in the Bible itself might have been composed around 1200 BCE.

So you have literal millenia of language development on either side of the split.

The time from proto-Semitic to the earliest biblical Hebrew is longer than the time from proto-Germanic to now.

Reading Akkadian to a Hebrew speaker is at least as pointless as reading Old Norse to a Dutch speaker or English speaker.  Seriously, how much sense can you make of this:

 Oddur óx upp heima með föður sínum þar til er hann var tólf vetra gamall. Ófeigur var fálátur löngum við Odd og unni honum lítið. 

[u/patachveamar → u/Weak-Doughnut5502]

This was what I got:

Oddur (name?) [lived?] up at home with his father there until he was 12 winters(?) old(?). Ófeigur (name?) was ("far-later long"? - i.e. he stayed for a while?) with Odd and his little (unni? cousin?).

Edit: Or maybe the second sentence is like: He was very(?) [ófeigur] for a while with his little [unni]?

[u/Jaynat_SF → u/Weak-Doughnut5502]

Reddit automatically translated that last paragraph for me without me noticing, so I just read everything in English and couldn't figure out where the unintelligible part is supposed to start... 😅

[u/Sufficient-Ad-1339 → u/Weak-Doughnut5502]

I thought I got heima and föður and if patachveamar translated them correctly, I did. But then I've peeked at the Old English side while reading Beowulf, and looked up the meaning of the Rohanese words and names in Tolkien which are in Old English. With this, I was also able to sometimes guess what Sigurd Jarlson was saying in Norwegian in The Mortal Thor.

Couldn't recognize a word of the spoken Akkadian, but maybe if it was written out, I might have recognized a root or several

[u/sunlitleaf → u/EconomyDue2459]

I personally feel like there’s more distance between Hebrew and the South Semitic languages. Hebrew and Akkadian have a fair number of noticeable cognates.

[u/EconomyDue2459 → u/sunlitleaf]

I assume you mean Ethiosemitic? That's more a consequence of Hebrew loaning words from Akkadian, and Ethiosemitic languages loaning words from non-Semitic languages. But if you were to compare, say, the Lord's Prayer in Ge'ez with how it would have looked like in Akkadian, the Ge'ez would be far closer to Hebrew and Aramaic.

[u/FelicePanda]

The accent makes it more difficult. Would have been better with an Hebrew, Arab, or Assyrian accent.

[u/Daniel_the_nomad]

The only word that I understood correctly is shamshia that is apparently the sun in Akkadian and in Hebrew the sun is shemesh

[u/KamtzaBarKamtza]

I'm not catching anything that sounds like Hebrew. However, the vowel word endings do sound (to my ear) like Aramaic

[u/cypherx]

You can understand a LOT more Ugaritic (a much closer language) but still only a few words per sentence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI6uRkdCb58

[u/Equinox8888]

Just sun. And perhaps “you conquered” at the end. She’s cringly pronouncing it anyway haha. Better have the transcript in Roman letters we would be able to decipher much more

[u/YoavPerry]

She is speaking Akkadian, not Hebrew. It’s an entirely different east Semitic language. Hebrew is northwestern Semitic.

[u/patachveamar]

Not a word.

[u/bigimotech]

Not a single word...

[u/Internal-College-943]

I understood a few words but I would not say I have any idea about what she is saying. This does sound like " English accent Hebrew" more then I accepted

[u/DentonTXguy]

Go buy a copy of Beowulf with the original Old English in it. I recommend the Chickering translation. Now read only the Old English portions. How much did you comprehend? The time abyss between Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew is about 1.5x to 2x that of the gap between Old and Modern English.

And Modern Hebrew, despite being built upon Biblical, is very different from Biblical. I’m not even sure if comparing Chaucer’s Middle English to Modern would be an appropriate comparison between the two.

[u/Capable-Tomato-9994]

I like to see it in writing. It will be more understandable. 

[u/Artistic-Hyena-8572]

Just “sun”, shemesh in Hebrew.
The rest was too far away. Her English accent didn’t help also.

[u/Brilliant-Aerie-379]

Just one word, shamshia, because she pronounced it very arabic-like and it sounded familiar. But i'm not sure if that's how the acadian actually sounded

[u/FudgeAtron]

I understood most of it but I also studied Akkadian, I actually found Akkadian really easy to learn from Hebrew, cuneform not so much

[u/itailu]

Nope

[u/Additional-Fix991]

After marriage? No.

[u/Mut3dly]

Nope. It’s not in Hebrew (Not modern Hebrew at least).