Abstract This paper discusses a unique, hitherto overlooked phenomenon in the emergence period of Modern Hebrew: the regular employment of two prepositions, ʾax̱are ‘after’ and ʿal yede ‘by means of’, as causal conjunctions. Despite the initial distribution of this usage, it did not integrate into present-day Modern Hebrew but was abruptly discarded following the consolidation of Hebrew as a spoken language in the early 1920s. Analysis of a vast textual corpus representing language use in the early Hebrew press over six decades in the seminal period of the modernization (1870s–1930s) indicates the regular employment of both prepositions as causal conjunctions (alongside their original temporal/instrumental functions) up to the 1920s, and the sudden disappearance of this usage thereafter. The paper focuses on the differing degrees of conventionalization of the two usages, and highlights the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved in the rise and decline of this unique phenomenon.
Yael Rashef (Wed,) studied this question.