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1. Introduction Among the many sub-languages of Modern Hebrew the written and broadcast texts of the language of mass communications or the media have in recent decades attracted increasing scholarly interest. The broadcast media provide texts which scholars employ mainly for describing or documenting the spoken language, while the press provides texts for the description and documentation of modern written Hebrew. Although modern journalistic writing produces texts of different types, genres and registers, the media as a whole are taken to represent an i…

Lexical affixes are particles, usually prepositions, which are attached to adjectives and nouns (and, in rare cases, to adverbs as well), usually as prefixes, but occasionally also as suffixes. They modify the meaning of the word to which they are attached, and form a highly cohesive structure with it. This type of construction is very common in the languages of the West, but almost completely absent from the early stages of Hebrew. Small wonder, then, that many of the prefixes are borrowed: פאן-ערבי pan-ʿaravi ‘pan-Arab’, אנטי-מוסרי ʾanṭi-musari ‘immoral’, פרו-מערבי pro-maʿaravi ‘p…

1. Introduction Changes in forms, meanings, and the lexicon due to contact between languages are a universal commonplace. Yet Modern Hebrew is remarkable in this respect, because of both the sheer quantity and the distribution of the different types and sources of borrowings it contains. The significance of borrowings in the language is reflected in the publication of (a) לועזי–עברי loʿazi–ʿivri ‘foreign (i.e., borrowings)–Hebrew’ dictionaries (in Hebrew), and (b) slang dictionaries listing numerous foreign borrowings. Two main factors contribute to the prominence of b…