Modern Hebrew

Modern Hebrew or Israeli Hebrew (Hebrew: עברית חדשה‎ ʿivrít ḥadašá[h] - "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew (עברית Ivrit), is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. Spoken in ancient times, Hebrew, a Canaanite language, was supplanted as the Jewish vernacular by the western dialect of Aramaic beginning in the third century BCE, though it continued to be used as a liturgical and literary language. It was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is one of the two official languages of Israel (along with Levantine Arabic).

Modern Hebrew is spoken by about nine million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers. Most speakers are citizens of Israel: about five million are Israelis who speak Modern Hebrew as their native language, 1.5 million are immigrants to Israel, 1.5 million are Arab citizens of Israel, whose first language is usually Arabic, and half a million are expatriate Israelis or diaspora Jews living outside Israel.

Israelis

Israelis (Hebrew: ישראלים‎ Yiśraʾelim, Arabic: الإسرائيليين‎ al-ʾIsrāʾīliyyin) are citizens or permanent residents of the State of Israel, a multiethnic society that is home to people of different national backgrounds. The largest ethnic groups in Israel are Jews (75%), followed by Arabs (20%) and other minorities (5%). Among the Jewish population, hundreds of thousands of Israeli-born Jews are of mixed ancestry of both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi descent. Over 50% of the Jewish population is of at least a partial Mizrahi descent.

Large-scale aliyah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Jewish diaspora communities in Europe and Yemen and more recent large-scale aliyah from North Africa, Western Asia, North America, South America the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia introduced many new cultural elements and have had profound impact on Israeli culture.

Israelis and people of Israeli descent live all over the world: in the United States, India, Canada, the United Kingdom, throughout Europe, and elsewhere. Almost 10 percent of the general population of Israel, are estimated to be living abroad.

Noun

A noun (from Latin nōmen, literally meaning "name") is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

History

Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun (nāma) is one of the four main categories of words defined.

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman noun.