Joe, you should know that two wrongs don't make a right, should you not??
HEBREW
Hebrew is believed to be the only dead language to have ever been revived and spoken as a native language by numerous generations. Hebrew became extinct as a spoken language around 200 CE when the Romans took over the Jewish life in Palestine. Aramaic became the dominant language. Hebrew however, remained a sacred language of the Jews used only in worship.
In 1881 Ben Yehuda, a Lithuanian-Jewish Student, proposed the idea of reviving the language of Prayer. His children were the first in over 30,000 years to speak the Hebrew language as their native tongue. Ben Yehuda devoted the rest of his life to reviving the language. He transformed the language, which in Biblical Times consisted of 8,000 words to a vocabulary of nearly 120,000. Today Hebrew is a rich and vibrant language spoken in many parts of the world.
There have been many attempts to revive numerous dead languages, but they have not been successful. The Hebrew language had an advantage because Jewish children learned Hebrew as a second language for religious purposes. Even though Hebrew was extinct as a native language it continued to be spoken, which was a major factor in its revival.
From:
ac.wwu.edu
Also:
The Hebrew Experiment
by David Porush
Like Gaelic in Ireland or Welsh in Wales, Israel has enacted a modern linguistic experiment in resurrecting a nearly-dead language. Like those experiments in Ireland and Wales, however, the Israeli revival of Hebrew had certain advantages and disadvantages peculiar to its political and cultural context. On the one hand, Hebrew was preserved and frozen in oral and written forms by the constancy of ritual prayer - the liturgy - and by ritual reading of the Torah. On the other hand, despite this cryogenesis, reviving Hebrew also meant trying to resurrect a language that hadn't evolved appreciably in the intervening two millenia and trying to make it viable for modern use.
Speaking Hebrew today with modern Israelis is a bit like travelling in a linguistic time machine to a cultural and cognitive era that is millenia old. Hebrew as it was resurrected didn't have the words for modern concepts and so it is filled with neologisms like "autoboos," "talphun," and the like.
Hebrew's grammatical structure is archaic and yet remarkably resilient. It is built around three-consonant roots which are then declined (agglutinated) for gender, number, tense, position, etc. by adding prefixes, suffixes, and vowels.
Modern Hebrew inherited no more than about 500 of these roots, so its lexicon was meager. (For the effects of this impoverished lexicon, click to see "Educating the Hebrew Mind")
Finally, Hebrew is a language of verbs. It has fewer conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and adjectives, proportionately and in absolute numbers, than any other modern language. The nouns, which are plentiful, can mostly be traced back to verbs.
As a result, the language is fluid and dynamic and restless, an amazingly plastic instrument of thought. It wears its etymology on its sleeve, and so relations among complexes of nouns and verbs reveal large states of associated meanings and, behind them, empires of knowledge. The language continually presents, through this system of tangled, interconnected roots, an animated map of the worldview it expresses.
For example, the root dalet-bet-resh gives us "daber" to speak and "davar" = thing or word as well as "dever," plague, relative of "debair" = to destroy. Put a "mem" in front of it and it produces both "desert" and "speech." So that when God addresses Moses in the desert/wilderness of Sinai, a special resonance and echoing play on words occurs.
Hebrew's contemporary relatives - Phoenician, Ammonite, Moabite, Edomite, Ugaritic - all died long ago. Assyrian Babylonian was, as one linguist describes it, "the language of the army and the counting house, and the lawcourt … boastful, efficient, and precise." (Goldman, Solomon. The Book of Books. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948:2 ) In fact, the only relative of Hebrew to survive is Arabic.
Hebrew has not been a national language since the beginning of the sixth century BCE, when Israel and Judea were conquered by the Baylonians, the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and many Jews were forced into Exile. When the Jews returned from Babylon to Israel in 536 BCE, they spoke a mixture of Aramaic, Persian, Babylonian and Hebrew. Since then, Hebrew has not been the language of any people other than Jews, and so the language was dispersed along with the people who spoke it. Yet, no one doubts that the Hebrew language as it appears in the Bible and as it was resurrected in modern Israel has a fundamental unity from its origins in the second millenium BCE. In Diaspora, Jews treat the language of their sacred book, the Torah, as holy in itself. They built cultural and religious walls around the Torah and its language, which both kept them alive and cut them off from complete and intimage commerce with the many host cultures through which they have passed.
The survival of Hebrew, and even its very nature, is intimately connected with the sociology - or more precisely, the religion - of the people who speak it. Can we doubt that Hebrew survived, without an empire like Latin or Greek or English, without racial coherence, without even national association, without any physical means other than the transcription and reading of a sacred text, for any other reason than that it was preserved by the passion of metaphysical commitment among the people which it sustained and which sustained it?
If Hebrew survived because it was inseparable from the religion of Jews, we might as well say the converse: that the religion and the Jews survived because of their commitment to Hebrew. But with so many strikes against it - insularity, obsolescence, the dispersion and persecution of the people who spoke it, an impoverished lexicon, an archaic grammar - how did the 20th century revival ever succeed?
The Hebrew experiment worked in part because, like America, Israel is almost completely a nation of immigrants: 85% of the now-native population arrived or is descended from those who came to Palestine and then Israel within the last century speaking and reading other languages. The need for a common language was strong in building the identity of the new Jewish state. In the nineteenth century, there were impassioned arguments over what would become the national language, with German, English, and Hebrew as the main contenders. The ultimate battle for Hebrew was won at the Technion - the Israel Institute of Technology where I wrote the first draft of this book in 1994. The Technion was built as a bastion of the European, and particularly German, academic tradition in 1913 with permission granted from the Ottoman Empire's government in Constantinople. German was the language of choice, not only because the Technion intended to be the exemplar of German culture, but because Hebrew was sadly deficient in technical vocabularies. Hebrew was a dead language, the language of the ancient culture of the Jews who built ancient Israel, preserved during the two millenium diaspora primarily in liturgy and among a few learned rabbis, who generally preferred Aramaic in any case, the later Semitic language that displaced Hebrew even in ancient Israel. Resurrecting Hebrew was of course also symbolic, both theologically and politically (the two terms being inseparable in the Middle East).
But the Zionists were adamant that Hebrew become the language of the yet-unborn Jewish nation. The monomaniacal leader of the Hebrew-language movement, Eliezer ben-Yehuda - who did more to resurrect Hebrew as a spoken language than any other individual or organization - threatened that "blood would flow in the streets" if the Technion adopted German [see Sachar, H. M. (1993). A History of Israel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 28]
When the Technion proposed to adopt German anyway, all the Hebrew teachers in Palestine went on strike. Students demonstrated outside the German consulate. "The Technion Crisis" as it became known, "threatened the entire Hebraic nature of the Zionist renaissance." [Sachar, 84] Eventually, in 1914, Hebrew was chosen as the language for instruction by the Technion faculty. This became the fulcrum to leverage the entire Zionist culture's commitment to Hebrew, since the Technion was also, symbolically, the theatre in which Jewish Palestine acted out its connection to modern, Western technological culture. Thereafter, every new immigrant was expected to take an ulpan- from the Herbrew word for aleph - an immersion course in spoken and written Hebrew. Even before there was a government, the ulpan was a social institution crucial to building a strong sense of common mission from the different groups of refugees and immigrants that composed Palestine and then Israel. The State of Israel sponsors many ulpanim, teaching wave after wave of immigrants this arcane langauge. Today, for instance, the ulpanim are dominated by Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, and many non-Jews who are eager to conduct business in Israel.
See also:
Fellman, J. (1973). The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language. The Hague: Mouton & Co N.V. Publishers.
Glinert, L. (1989). The Grammar of Modern Hebrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saenz-Badillos, A. (1993). A History of the Hebrew Language (John Elwode, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. |
