Remembering Hebrew's Rebirth This Week

I still recall the day my sixth grade teacher in public school referred to Hebrew as one of the "scholarly languages"--for that week at least, taking a taxi to the Talmud Torah seemed more worthwhile as Hebrew seemed to come alive.

My sixth grade teacher came to mind when I read David Hazony's article about the 150th anniversary of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's birthday.

Although every language is unique, there is something especially intriguing about Hebrew. Part of it is the lingual leverage: It is a compact tongue in which prepositions become one-letter prefixes, possessives become one-letter suffixes, and the word “is” does not exist. As a result, you can say in just a few words things that in English may take long sentences. The words of the prophets are both more powerful and more intimate when read in the original. And modern Israelis are constantly referring back to Old-Testament idioms and ideas.

But what is especially beguiling is the story of the language. When the founder of modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was born (150 years ago this week!), the language was essentially an ecclesiastical one, like Latin: Restricted to the Bible, the synagogue, and scholarly texts, used in conversation only when Jews of distant lands had to communicate. Of all the achievements of the Zionist movement, the re-establishment of modern Hebrew is one of the most impressive and enduring. Today, an entire country thrives on an ancient tongue, which has modernized and developed to cover every aspect of life, from sex to sports to politics to art.

Especially interesting is the article he links to by Meir Shalev, The Hebrew Battleground, about the growth of Hebrew and its pitfalls.

Harry Mount's A Vote For Latin in The New York Times pales in comparison. He writes about the importance of learning Latin, admitting that if you do you won't necessarily become great like the students who learned it in centuries past

But what they gain is a glimpse into the past that provides a fuller, richer view of the present. Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry).

Mount spends more time on extolling the advantages of translating Latin into English and vice versa than of learning the language itself--part of the problem when no country speaks Latin natively.

I wonder what gets under the Muslim skin more--that Israel is back on the map or that the Jewish State, like its language, has undergone such a miraculous revival and growth.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Hebrew and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.