Hebrew language debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile, when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic. Hebrew was extinct as a colloquial language by Late Antiquity, but it continued to be used as a literary language and as the liturgical language of Judaism, evolving various dialects of literary Medieval Hebrew, until its revival as a spoken language in the late 19th century. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating
Hebrew language plane"). Note that this does not happen to "mé" (the form of "min" or "mi-" used before the letter "he"), therefore "mé-ha-matos" is a valid form, which means "from the airplane". Like most other languages, the vocabulary of the Hebrew language is divided into verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so on, and its sentence structure can be analyzed by terms like object, subject, and so on. Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet, which is an "impure" abjad, or consonant-only script, of 22 letters. The ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet is similar to those used for Canaanite and