Revival of the Hebrew language between spoken street language and written language. Among the Jews of Europe, the situation resembled that of the general population, but with: In the Arab Middle East, Ladino and Colloquial Arabic were the spoken languages most prevalent in Jewish communities (with Ladino more prevalent in the Mediterranean and Arabic, Aramaic, Kurdish, and Persian more widely spoken by Jews in the East), while Classical Arabic was used for secular writing, and Hebrew used for religious purposes (though some Jewish scholars from the Arab world, such as Maimonedes (1135-1204), wrote primarily in Arabic or in Judeo-Arabic languages). The revival of the Hebrew
Yemenite Hebrew is written [in the Scriptures]: Ewes ("raḥelim"), two-hundred.' He answered him, 'The language of the Torah is by itself, and the language employed by the Sages is by itself!'" (לשון תורה לעצמה, לשון חכמים לעצמן). This passage from the Talmud is often quoted by grammarians of Yemenite origin to explain certain "discrepancies" found in vocalization of words where a comparable source can be found in the Hebrew Bible, such as the Yemenite tradition in rabbinic literature to say ("maʻbīr"), rather than ("maʻăvīr") – although the latter rendering appears in Scripture , or to say ("zīʻah"), with "ḥīraq", rather than, ("zeʻah"),