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A great deal of poetry was written, by poets such as Dunash ben Labrat, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi, Moses ibn Ezra and Abraham ibn Ezra, in a "purified" Hebrew based on the work of these grammarians, and in Arabic quantitative or strophic meters
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This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets.[76]
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The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to a distinct style of philosophical Hebrew
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This is used in the translations made by the Ibn Tibbon family
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(Original Jewish philosophical works were usually written in Arabic.[citation needed]) Another important influence was Maimonides, who developed a simple style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code, the Mishneh Torah
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Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and the Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud.
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Hebrew persevered through the ages as the main language for written purposes by all Jewish communities around the world for a large range of uses—not only liturgy, but also poetry, philosophy, science and medicine, commerce, daily correspondence and contracts
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There have been many deviations from this generalization such as Bar Kokhba's letters to his lieutenants, which were mostly in Aramaic,[77] and Maimonides' writings, which were mostly in Arabic;[78] but overall, Hebrew did not cease to be used for such purposes
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For example, the first Middle East printing press, in Safed (modern Israel), produced a small number of books in Hebrew in 1577, which were then sold to the nearby Jewish world.[79] This meant not only that well-educated Jews in all parts of the world could correspond in a mutually intelligible language, and that books and legal documents published or written in any part of the world could be read by Jews in all other parts, but that an educated Jew could travel and converse with Jews in distant places, just as priests and other educated Christians could converse in Latin
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For example, Rabbi Avraham Danzig wrote the Chayei Adam in Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish, as a guide to Halacha for the "average 17-year-old" (Ibid
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Introduction 1)
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Similarly, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan's purpose in writing the Mishnah Berurah was to "produce a work that could be studied daily so that Jews might know the proper procedures to follow minute by minute"
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The work was nevertheless written in Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic, since, "the ordinary Jew [of Eastern Europe] of a century ago, was fluent enough in this idiom to be able to follow the Mishna Berurah without any trouble."[80]
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Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany
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In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate for commercial purposes
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This Hebrew dialect was to a certain extent a pidgin.[81] Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of the national revival (שיבת ציון, Shivat Tziyon, later Zionism), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language
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Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time
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Those languages were Jewish dialects of local languages, including Judaeo-Spanish (also called "Judezmo" and "Ladino"), Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and Bukhori (Tajiki), or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian, Persian and Arabic.
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The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along the 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew
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New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Ben-Yehuda) and older Aramaic and Latin
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Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French
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Modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921 (along with English and Arabic), and then in 1948 became an official language of the newly declared State of Israel
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Hebrew is the most widely spoken language in Israel today.
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In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary Hebrew tradition revived as the spoken language of modern Israel, called variously Israeli Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, New Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew, Standard Hebrew and so on
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Israeli Hebrew exhibits some features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic.
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The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah movement
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The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Ha-Me'assef (The Gatherer), was published by maskilim in Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad) from 1783 onwards.[82] In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g
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Hamagid, founded in Ełk in 1856) multiplied
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Prominent poets were Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language.
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The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated in the late 19th century by the efforts of Ben-Yehuda
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He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 immigrated to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire
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Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora "shtetl" lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language
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However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by different grammar and style, in the writings of people like Ahad Ha'am and others
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His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into a gradually accepted movement
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It was not, however, until the 1904–1914 Second Aliyah that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the more highly organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants
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When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country's three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion
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A constructed modern language with a truly Semitic vocabulary and written appearance, although often European in phonology, was to take its place among the current languages of the nations.
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While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous[83] (because Hebrew was the holy language of the Torah and therefore some thought that it should not be used to discuss everyday matters), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of the British Mandate who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages
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A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established
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After the establishment of Israel, it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language
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The results of Ben-Yehuda's lexicographical work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda Dictionary)
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The seeds of Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine
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At the time, members of the Old Yishuv and a very few Hasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar, refused to speak Hebrew and spoke only Yiddish.
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In the Soviet Union, the use of Hebrew, along with other Jewish cultural and religious activities, was suppressed
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Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew "reactionary" since it was associated with Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the People's Commissariat for Education as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself did not cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes[84])
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The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being the spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be treated as a foreign language.[85] Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s
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Despite numerous protests,[86] a policy of suppression of the teaching of Hebrew operated from the 1930s on
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Later in the 1980s in the USSR, Hebrew studies reappeared due to people struggling for permission to go to Israel (refuseniks)
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Several of the teachers were imprisoned, e.g
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Yosef Begun, Ephraim Kholmyansky, Yevgeny Korostyshevsky and others responsible for a Hebrew learning network connecting many cities of the USSR.
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Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation
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However, the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native language and often introduced calques from Yiddish and phono-semantic matchings of international words.
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Despite using Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation as its primary basis, modern Israeli Hebrew has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in some respects, mainly the following:
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The vocabulary of Israeli Hebrew is much larger than that of earlier periods
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According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann:
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The number of attested Biblical Hebrew words is 8198, of which some 2000 are hapax legomena (the number of Biblical Hebrew roots, on which many of these words are based, is 2099)
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The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20,000, of which (i) 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i.e
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they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have a Hebrew form
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Medieval Hebrew added 6421 words to (Modern) Hebrew
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The approximate number of new lexical items in Israeli is 17,000 (cf
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14,762 in Even-Shoshan 1970 [...])
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With the inclusion of foreign and technical terms [...], the total number of Israeli words, including words of biblical, rabbinic and medieval descent, is more than 60,000.[89]: 64–65
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In Israel, Modern Hebrew is currently taught in institutions called Ulpanim (singular: Ulpan)
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There are government-owned, as well as private, Ulpanim offering online courses and face-to-face programs.
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Modern Hebrew is the primary official language of the State of Israel
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As of 2013[update], there are about 9 million Hebrew speakers worldwide,[90] of whom 7 million speak it fluently.[91][92][93]
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Currently, 90% of Israeli Jews are proficient in Hebrew, and 70% are highly proficient.[94] Some 60% of Israeli Arabs are also proficient in Hebrew,[94] and 30% report having a higher proficiency in Hebrew than in Arabic.[27] In total, about 53% of the Israeli population speaks Hebrew as a native language,[95] while most of the rest speak it fluently
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In 2013 Hebrew was the native language of 49% of Israelis over the age of 20, with Russian, Arabic, French, English, Yiddish and Ladino being the native tongues of most of the rest
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Some 26% of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and 12% of Arabs reported speaking Hebrew poorly or not at all.[94][96]
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Steps have been taken to keep Hebrew the primary language of use, and to prevent large-scale incorporation of English words into the Hebrew vocabulary
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The Academy of the Hebrew Language of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem currently invents about 2,000 new Hebrew words each year for modern words by finding an original Hebrew word that captures the meaning, as an alternative to incorporating more English words into Hebrew vocabulary
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The Haifa municipality has banned officials from using English words in official documents, and is fighting to stop businesses from using only English signs to market their services.[97] In 2012, a Knesset bill for the preservation of the Hebrew language was proposed, which includes the stipulation that all signage in Israel must first and foremost be in Hebrew, as with all speeches by Israeli officials abroad
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The bill's author, MK Akram Hasson, stated that the bill was proposed as a response to Hebrew "losing its prestige" and children incorporating more English words into their vocabulary.[98]
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Hebrew is one of several languages for which the constitution of South Africa calls to be respected in their use for religious purposes.[8] Also, Hebrew is an official national minority language in Poland, since 6 January 2005.[7] Hamas has made Hebrew a compulsory language taught in schools in the Gaza Strip.[99]
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Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic consonant inventory, with pharyngeal /ʕ ħ/, a series of "emphatic" consonants (possibly ejective, but this is debated), lateral fricative /ɬ/, and in its older stages also uvular /χ ʁ/
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/χ ʁ/ merged into /ħ ʕ/ in later Biblical Hebrew, and /b ɡ d k p t/ underwent allophonic spirantization to [v ɣ ð x f θ] (known as begadkefat)
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The earliest Biblical Hebrew vowel system contained the Proto-Semitic vowels /a aː i iː u uː/ as well as /oː/, but this system changed dramatically over time.
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By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, /ɬ/ had shifted to /s/ in the Jewish traditions, though for the Samaritans it merged with /ʃ/ instead.[51] The Tiberian reading tradition of the Middle Ages had the vowel system /a ɛ e i ɔ o u ă ɔ̆ ɛ̆/, though other Medieval reading traditions had fewer vowels.
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A number of reading traditions have been preserved in liturgical use
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In Oriental (Sephardi and Mizrahi) Jewish reading traditions, the emphatic consonants are realized as pharyngealized, while the Ashkenazi (northern and eastern European) traditions have lost emphatics and pharyngeals (although according to Ashkenazi law, pharyngeal articulation is preferred over uvular or glottal articulation when representing the community in religious service such as prayer and Torah reading), and show the shift of /w/ to /v/
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The Samaritan tradition has a complex vowel system that does not correspond closely to the Tiberian systems.
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Modern Hebrew pronunciation developed from a mixture of the different Jewish reading traditions, generally tending towards simplification
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In line with Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation, emphatic consonants have shifted to their ordinary counterparts, /w/ to /v/, and [ɣ ð θ] are not present
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Most Israelis today also merge /ʕ ħ/ with /ʔ χ/, do not have contrastive gemination, and pronounce /r/ as a uvular fricative [ʁ] or a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ rather than an alveolar trill, because of Ashkenazi Hebrew influences
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The consonants /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ have become phonemic due to loan words, and /w/ has similarly been re-introduced.
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Hebrew grammar is partly analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative and accusative using prepositional particles rather than grammatical cases
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However, inflection plays a decisive role in the formation of verbs and nouns
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For example, nouns have a construct state, called "smikhut", to denote the relationship of "belonging to": this is the converse of the genitive case of more inflected languages
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Words in smikhut are often combined with hyphens
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In modern speech, the use of the construct is sometimes interchangeable with the preposition "shel", meaning "of"
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There are many cases, however, where older declined forms are retained (especially in idiomatic expressions and the like), and "person"-enclitics are widely used to "decline" prepositions.
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Like all Semitic languages, the Hebrew language exhibits a pattern of stems consisting typically of "triliteral", or 3-consonant consonantal roots, from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs are formed in various ways: e.g
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by inserting vowels, doubling consonants, lengthening vowels and/or adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes
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4-consonant roots also exist and became more frequent in the modern language due to a process of coining verbs from nouns that are themselves constructed from 3-consonant verbs
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Some triliteral roots lose one of their consonants in most forms and are called "Nakhim" (Resting).
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Hebrew uses a number of one-letter prefixes that are added to words for various purposes
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These are called inseparable prepositions or "Letters of Use" (Hebrew: אותיות השימוש, romanized: Otiyot HaShimush)
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Such items include: the definite article ha- (/ha/) (= "the"); prepositions be- (/be/) (= "in"), le- (/le/) (= "to"; a shortened version of the preposition el), mi- (/mi/) (= "from"; a shortened version of the preposition min); conjunctions ve- (/ve/) (= "and"), she- (/ʃe/) (= "that"; a shortened version of the Biblical conjunction asher), ke- (/ke/) (= "as", "like"; a shortened version of the conjunction kmo).
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The vowel accompanying each of these letters may differ from those listed above, depending on the first letter or vowel following it
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The rules governing these changes are hardly observed in colloquial speech as most speakers tend to employ the regular form
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