In this language challenge, a Hebrew speaker from Israel, Noa, competes against an Arabic speaker from Egypt, Sherouk. If you live in Toronto or the surrounding areas, speak a language that has not been featured on our channel and would like to participate in a future video, and/or if you have any suggestions or feedback, please contact us on Instagram:
Shahrzad (@shahrzad.pe): / shahrzad.pe
Bahador (@BahadorAlast): / bahadoralast
Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages which share a lot of similarities in their vocabulary. Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language and the only living Canaanite language left in world. Ancient Hebrew went extinct as a spoken language many centuries ago. However, it survived as a liturgical language for Judaism thanks to Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and other texts. For this reason, Hebrew is now considered the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. In the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language. Hebrew became the lingua franca of Palestine's Jews, and subsequently the official language of the State of Israel. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population in the world.
Meanwhile, Arabic is a Central Semitic language and the official language of Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Malta (Maltese Arabic), Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, SADR, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania (Zanzibar), Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Arabic is also the liturgical language of Islam. Arabic has influenced some European languages, such as Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Valencian, Catalan, Sicilian, Greek and Bulgarian. Arabic has also great influenced Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Maltese, Urdu, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Hindi, Malay, Maldivian, Indonesian, Pashto, Punjabi, Tagalog, Sindhi and Hausa and some languages in parts of Africa. In addition, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages including Greek and Persian.