Grant tells the story of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who revived the use of Hebrew outside of religious contexts. In 1850, no one spoke Hebrew as an everyday household language; now it’s spoken by more than 5 million people. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hebrew Spoken at Home”
Earlier we were talking about dying languages, and when I think about dying languages and efforts to document them, I think of the story of Elyseer Ben Yehuda.
How so?
Well, in the 1850s, when Israel was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire, Ben Yehuda migrated with his wife to Jerusalem.
And he decided that they would speak to each other in Hebrew rather than the languages they had spoken in Russia.
Now, the thing is, at the time, Hebrew wasn’t the everyday language of anybody, nobody.
And it hadn’t been for centuries.
It was a language of the temple.
It was a religious language only and probably hadn’t been spoken in the home to talk about things like cooking and family life for millennia.
So he had to coin many of the words that were needed for modern life.
And starting with the two of them and then later with their son Yitzhak, who became the first person to speak modern Hebrew as a first language, it caught on.
And by 1948, Israel had 600,000 modern Hebrew speakers, and today it has more than 5 million.
That is a language success story.
No kidding.
And I think of that story when I think about the efforts to teach young people the languages of their grandparents or their parents or their elders.
They’re doing it in Hawaii with Hawaiian, in Oklahoma with the Miami language, in Maine with French, and a dozen other places in North America.
It gives me hope that these languages will survive.
Grant, how about if we include links to the story of Ben Yehuda and language revivals on our website?
That’d be great.
And we welcome your calls to 1-877-929-9673.
You can ask us about these languages, and we’ll have tons of stuff to say on the subject.
Grant, another thing that we can talk about sometime is the struggle of ancient languages to incorporate modern concepts.
You just sent me an article the other day about Icelandic and how the word for computer in Icelandic,
Because it’s a very, very old language.
It’s kind of fossilized.
The word for computer is what, numbers which?
Yeah, it’s really incredible.
And they’ve done that with Latin.
I know the Vatican every couple of years comes out with new words in Latin for things like hot dog and bikini.
Yeah, or hippie, which is conformitatis osor, a hater of conformity.
And I think there’s a fabulous one for motorcycle that I’m not remembering,
But it’s something like two-wheeled vehicle driven by fire-bearing juice.
Well, let’s talk about it on the website.
It’s waywordradio.org/discussion.
That’s where you’ll find our discussion forum, of course.
And you can always email us anytime, day or night.
