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In the modern linguistic school of thought, are Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek related? Hebrew is classified as Afroasiatic->Semitic, while Greek is Indo-European->Hellenic. However, in Jewish tradition, they are considered related.

A Sefer Torah (special scroll with the 5 Books of Moses) is allowed to be written in Greek, due to being able to translate it perfectly. (See answer to this question; see my question here about if it was ever done.) However, this Greek that was mentioned is an extinct language (per Maimonides, mentioned in the question).

The Talmud occasionally makes references to Greek words in interpreting Biblical verses as well. I don't have specific examples right now, but i know they exist.

Is this view shared by modern linguists?

Related: Is Classical Hebrew an Indo-European language? and Can Modern Hebrew be considered an Indo-European language?

Sir Cornflakes
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Scimonster
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    One verse with a few Greek words is Daniel 3:5 for the instruments, e.g. the kithara. Interestingly, at least one commentary cites the argument that this suggests the inauthenticity of Daniel, though I don't think that's commonly believed now. – Luke Sawczak Mar 10 '18 at 13:18
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    But kithara is considered a pre-Greek word (i.e., A loan word in proto-Greek from an unknown other language). – Sir Cornflakes Mar 10 '18 at 13:45
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    @jknappen I don't know the history much myself - I just know that verse is often written about as having Greek instruments with names that look like transliterations and don't appear elsewhere in the Bible. Perhaps the commentaries are wrong, though. Actually, Barnes goes on to agree with your point: "That such names are found given to instruments of music by the Greeks is certain; but it is not certain from where they obtained the name." – Luke Sawczak Mar 10 '18 at 14:01
  • Can we protect this question? The amount of low quality answers is astounding. – dROOOze Feb 11 '20 at 13:44

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You are using related in two different senses.

When linguists refer to languages being related, they almost always mean "genetically related" - stemming ultimately from the same linguistic source. Most linguists today do not regard Hebrew and Greek as genetically related, but there is a respectable minority who believe that we can trace relationship further back than Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European to a superphylum, such as Nostratic, or Eurasiatic, depending on the particular theory. In those linguists' conception, Hebrew and Greek are related, but very distantly, in the way that a horse and a fly are very distantly related.

Whatever kind of relationship the Jewish tradition talks about it is nothing like the linguistic conception of genetic relationship. It sounds from your account that it is something to do with suitability for use in particular contexts. Such a concept is purely a product of thinking about languages and not about their innate or historical properties, whereas the idea genetic relationship is predicated on there being an objective historical relationship, that of common descent.

Colin Fine
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    My guess is that the notion of suitability in question could also have to do with the status of Greek as a highly developed literary language and in particular with the availability of translations for all relevant Hebrew words -- or at least an established process for coining new Hebrew-based words in Greek. (But this is just a semi-educated guess based on superficial knowledge.) –  Jan 02 '15 at 11:56
  • This framing of common descent (i.e. the same parents, not just some shared ancestors) leads to various problems, first of all the assumption of a (necessarily small) unique Proto Indo European homeland, which stands in contrast with many if not most existing languages that are an amalgamation of various language dialects. Why is English noted as a Germanic language, but does use do inflationary, a manner it took on from Celtic!? – vectory Apr 02 '19 at 06:42
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    @vectory: because do-support is notable specifically because borrowings from Celtic into English (especially grammatical borrowings) are so rare. – Colin Fine Apr 04 '19 at 23:42
  • @vectory or people who claim that English is a Scandinavian/North Germanic language because it uses a word order that is closer to modern Danish than modern German. In reality this is because Old English came under heavy linguistic influence from Old Norse due to Viking colonization in the British Isles. – Robert Columbia May 01 '19 at 19:29
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The Indo-Semitic hypothesis maintains that a genetic relationship exists between Indo-European and Semitic and that the Indo-European and the Semitic language families descend from a prehistoric language ancestral to them both. The theory has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times, but historically it has had a number of supporting advocates and arguments, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Wikipedia

curiousdannii
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Sorb
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    People can hypothesize anything, though; is there any real evidence for this one? I don't know any current linguists who actually believe in "Nostratic". – Draconis Apr 02 '19 at 03:11
  • @Draconis There are at least a few https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages#21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_R._Bomhard – b a Apr 02 '19 at 12:17
  • Welcome to the site, Sorb! Please edit your answer with some content, posting a link and adding a quote from the link is not really a useful answer. – Alenanno Apr 06 '19 at 12:05
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I don't know maybe in the letters. Alef= Alph(a) (ph and f make same the sound) bet= bet(a) Gimmel= Gamm(a) Dalef= Delt(a) Heh= Epsilon ? Vav= Upsilon? Zayin= Zeta ? Chet= Et(A) Tet= Thet(a) yod= iot(a) (d to t to d iod(a)) Yoda :). Kaf= Kapp(a) ( f and ph f and p make the same sounds) Lamed= Lambd(a) Mem= Mu Nun= Nu Samech =Xi? Ayin= Omicron? Peh= Pi or Phi Rho= Resh (no sh sound in Greek also so Reh) Sigma= Shin Tau= Tav Psi= Tsadeh? Chi and Omega?

So also transliteration. If you notice this letter are identical I put the (a) so to show how to Bet and just add an "a" Beta. I put questions because some are not as similar, but shin is transliterated sigma in Greek. Well, maybe the alphabet or alef-bet see it is similar. So I know of people who teach Biblical Hebrew and Greek, well on Facebook one Izzy Avraham and one of his lessons showed how Greek was familiar with Hebrew in letters. Then How even the Latin alphabet was familiar with Hebrew. I mean you can see it on Youtube.

Then another thing notice how in Hebrew Chet is also Het but in Frankish the name Childeric so it is really Hildr then how Charles is Karl it seems to be similar to Chet. Then how I and J in Old Norse are pronounced like y like Jorvic is Yorvic or York. Sorry of the topic I don't know but anyone can see there are similarities in the names of these letters.

curiousdannii
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Robert Wayne Vernon Jr.
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    They both use alphabets originating in the Phoenician alphabet. That does not tell us much about the languages themselves. Our Latin script then originates from the same via the Greek alphabet. – Vladimir F Героям слава Aug 18 '19 at 18:00
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    As Vladimir F says, both the Greek and the Hebrew writing systems are descended from the Phoenician abjad (a sort of consonant-only alphabet). That's why the letter names are similar. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us anything about the relationship of the languages themselves; Swahili, Nahuatl, and English are all written in the same alphabet, for example, but there's no genetic relationship between those languages (at least as far back as current methods can reconstruct). – Draconis Aug 18 '19 at 20:09
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Allow me. Greek is actually called Hellenic and the name of the country is call Hellas or actually hEllas (h substituted an ancient toning system of middle ages). Ελλάς is made of El and las ie the land/nation of El. Sounds too Hebrew?

Hebrew is found in Bible yet it also has its Greek word HObreos that became Hebreoos. Again the H is a tone. Obrios Οβριος was actually means “the above waters sent by Zeus” as Dias the ....God of gods in mythology was the god that gave the flood and the living rain. Sounds too Greek?

Equally main Greek words like truth , αλήθεια al-ethos combines the divine Semitic Lamda aleph and Greek ethos which means both «the appearance or the character “ So for Hellenic alethia/truth means the appearance of the divinity or the ethics of El. Even sacred words and mysteries (ELefsinean) use L even the Sun in Greek is Helios ie El-ios where again Semitic L comes as the light.

Bottom line is Greek and Hebrew have too many things in common that modern nationalist linguistics do not want to either admit or mention as if we are two different people. We are not. We are more connected that one can today imagine.

Αθανάσιος Καπράλος
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    Do you have any credible source to support what you are saying? This is not something that is being tought in universities. – Midas Feb 23 '19 at 20:35
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    I don't know why you say /h/ was a tone. It was a consonant like any other, which is clear from prefix mutation and Grassmann's Law. Hellēn comes from a pre-Greek source but you'd need more evidence than two letters to claim it was from Hebrew, especially since those two letters come right in the middle. And you're mixing up your Greek letters: alētheia has an eta, as in lēthē, while ethos has an epsilon. – Draconis Feb 23 '19 at 21:52
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    Similarly, you're claiming Hellēn with an epsilon, alētheia with an alpha, and hēlios with an eta all come from Semitic el. In other words, you seem to be claiming that having literally any vowel followed by lambda is evidence of a relationship with Hebrew. Would you say English "alone", "olive", "bell", "tile" prove that English is related to Hebrew? – Draconis Feb 23 '19 at 21:54
  • @Draconis, can lengthening of epsilon to eta, or vice versa, not be explained with metrics, stress, prosody and the like? With further reconstruction, most vowels are represented as PIE *e anyhow, later vowels rather reflecting the ominous laryngeals, also semivowels, and I don't know what other processes. – vectory Feb 24 '19 at 17:23
  • @ΑθανάσιοςΚαπράλος it would be much more agreeable to assume that it's just well difficult. Roots like el- are just too short and too frequent for a simple analysis. I could as well propose that it relates to ile (island) given the many islands of Greece, especially crete. And I have at least two other derivations in the back of my mind. I wouldn't count on folk names deriving from a single source, because they are prone for glorifying folk etymology. That makes it extraordinarily opaque. Assume phonetic consonant lengthening for /l/ and you are left with he or just e. – vectory Feb 24 '19 at 17:39
  • @vectory Sure, but there'd have to be some pattern to it: in Attic, for example, epsilon regularly lengthens to epsilon-iota, not to eta. (Look at the epsilon-contract verbs for some attestations.) Claiming this word is an exception to that rule is an extra assumption that the straightforward derivation from a-lēth-eia doesn't require, so Occam's Razor suggests the latter. – Draconis Feb 24 '19 at 17:54
  • @Draconis maybe a pattern is needed to make a case, but mutation can happen spontaniously, under various circumstances. Phonetics depend on environment and not all words appear in the same environment. Endonyms are a special case, and eventually so unimportant that some folks don't even have one or use a pars pro toto. The environment is often authoritative, and the name is symbolic, which makes it prone for abstraction, so a mutation can stick. – vectory Feb 24 '19 at 18:48
  • @vectory Sorry, but that sounds like grasping at straws. At that point you're saying that a word with a clear derivation a-lēth-eia (with three well-attested Greek roots going back to PIE, and a very common derivation pattern) actually comes from el-eth-eia > al-ēth-eia, with the first two vowels both changing in different and unattested ways, and the first root actually coming from Hebrew, through a contact that somehow left no archaeological evidence. – Draconis Feb 24 '19 at 18:56
  • @Draconis Given the assumption of a Hebrew source, relying on Hellenic Alphabet derivations is of course rather disengineous. In fact, the derivation of the alphabet does require investigation of Hebrew influence, religious or not. Just sayin': Modern Hebrew denotes L with a specific letter, but its ancient sound quality is less than certain, and the Arabic aleph at least can stand for /l/ and /i/ (and whatnot). A tripple aleph would be liable for elision--just sayin. – vectory Feb 24 '19 at 19:10
  • @Draconis now you made a different, stronger argument than before, that I was not interested in, I can likely look it up myself.. You talking about "no archaeological evidence" that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. – vectory Feb 24 '19 at 19:13
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Draconis Feb 24 '19 at 19:22