CULTURE-ISRAEL: The Man Who Spread the Hebrew Word

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Deborah Horan

JERUSALEM, Apr 14 1998 (IPS) - Back in 1889 in then Palestine, Lithuanian-born Eliezer Ben Yehuda made a pact with a group of his Jewish friends to stop using their native Yiddish, and speak only in Hebrew.

At the time the idea was revolutionary – and it marked an historic moment in the eventual creation of the state of Israel. Jewish writers in Europe had been creating novels, poetry and plays in Hebrew since the mid-19th century, but it was not a spoken language. The small pockets of Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron and the Galilee spoke Arabic, German, Yiddish, or ‘Ladino’, a dialect spoken by Jews from Spain.

Hebrew was the language of the Torah, but had not been spoken in Palestine since biblical times yet Ben Yehuda believed that a common language was necessary if the dream of creating a Jewish state was ever to be realised.

In 1890, he put his idea to work by establishing the Hebrew Language Council. There, he began the arduous task of reviving ancient Hebrew to fit the needs of a modern world. Only 25 years later, around 1915, Ben Yehuda’s bold experiment had taken hold: a language dormant for some 1,700 years had been resurrected and was being used in daily conversation among the Jews of Palestine.

Its revival would come to be seen as one of the lasting achievements of Israel and a force for integration of Jewish immigrants from all over the world. Today, it is the mother tongue of nearly 5 million Israeli Jews and the second language of most of Israel’s one million Arabs.

“One hundred years ago, there were very few people who could speak it,” said Shlomo Avineri. “Today, it’s a language like any other language. That’s the success. ”

Because Hebrew was never a dead language, like Latin or Ancient Greek, reviving it mostly meant teaching people how to pronounce words they were already familiar with in the Torah, or Old Testament, and the Talmud, the laws compiled by rabbis until the 3rd century AD.

But creating a language capable of communicating modern concepts and inventions also meant inventing thousands of new words not found in either ancient source. Words like ‘love’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘happiness’ were in the Torah, ‘spectacles’, ‘newspaper’ and ‘notebook’ were not.

“They had to create hundreds and hundreds of words,” said Gavriel Birenbaum, a Hebrew linguist at Tel Aviv University and secretary of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, a government body that creates new Hebrew words and adds them to the official lexicon.

“Tools in the kitchen, pots, cutlery – all these words had to be coined. “To do that, Ben Yehuda relied heavily on mixing stems and patterns of ancient words to come up with new meanings so that the “historical continuity” of the language would be preserved, said Birenbaum.

It’s a method the Academy still uses today. For instance, in the Torah, the three-letter stem ‘frt’ means ‘private’. Today, ‘hafreta’ means ‘privatization’.

From the stem ‘qlt’, meaning ‘to absorb’, linguists created ‘qaletet’, which means ‘tape recorder’. And ‘gld’ — ‘to consolidate’, was made into ‘glida’ — ‘ice cream’.

When the biblical meaning of a word was unclear, linguists guessed the meaning from the context or turned to parallel sources. In the Book of Isaiah, it is written “when you cry out, ‘kibbutzai’ will save you”. Scholars interpreted the word to mean ‘your group’; today, a ‘kibbutz’ is a communal village.

Linguists turned to an early Greek translation to find the meaning of the word ‘khasmal’, used in the Book of Ezekiel. There, they found the word ‘electron’. Linguists say the word probably meant ‘glittery’ in ancient times. Today, it means ‘electricity’.

Historians and linguists say the revival of Hebrew succeeded because it was associated with a Jewish renaissance – even outside Palestine. In Russia, the Habimah theater, now a national theatre in Tel Aviv, performed plays in Hebrew in the 20s and 30s. In Palestine, Hebrew caught on because it was part of the nationalist struggle, while Yiddish, spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe, was seen as the language the ghetto.

“Even if they didn’t know a word of it, they had an emotional attachment to it,” said Birenbaum. “They knew it was a Jewish language. “Immigrants were encouraged to adopt Hebrew names. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was required of diplomats and political leaders.

Many of Israel’s future prime ministers chose a Hebrew name after they arrived in Palestine: David Gruen became David Ben Gurion; Goldie Meyerson became Golda Meir; Simon Persky became Shimon Peres.

Still, the Hebrew lexicon, ‘frozen’ in the language of the Bible for centuries and therefore unable to develop naturally, is relatively small at around 40,000 words. A typical English dictionary, by comparison, has at least 80,000.

This limited vocabulary has forced Hebrew speakers to borrow English until a Hebrew word is approved by the Academy. Until recently, Israelis had no Hebrew equivalent for words including ‘computer’, ‘celebrity’, ‘friendly fire’, ‘blackout’, ‘sit-com’ or ‘roller blades’.

Since then they have been agreed, and some have caught on. Most Israelis use the word ‘makshev’ instead of ‘computer’. But others haven’t had so much success. Almost no-one uses the phrase ‘galgiliot lahav’ to say roller blades. And linguists still haven’t succeeded in getting Israelis to stop using the English word ‘brake’ whien driving, or talking about driving. They even attach the Hebrew plural ‘im’ to the word – they say ‘brakesim’ – to mean more than one.

Yet unlike the years of the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of Jews migrated from Morocco, Iraq and Yemen, running the risk of undermining Hebrew with other langauges, linguists say these sporadic borrowings from English are not a problem.

In 1948, only 54 percent of the Jewish population spoke Hebrew was their primary language. Fifty years later, Hebrew rules and even the arrival of one million Jews from the former Soviet Union hasn’t changed things, said Birenbaum.

“It’s not a threat to the language,” he said. “The strange and fantastic experiment of more than 100 years ago to revive the Hebrew language… It was a success. ”