Israelis mark National Hebrew Day
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A hundred-twenty years ago a scholar named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, took a dead language and started adding words. Modern Hebrew is still a work in progress. The Academy of the Hebrew Language is constantly introducing new words to keep Israel’s national language up-to-date. Daniel Estrin reports.
SCRIPT
Hebrew Language Academy
Daniel Estrin
If you’ve got a suggestion for a new Hebrew word, Keren Dubnov wants to hear about it.
DUBNOV: If I look here at my sent items…
Keren’s in charge of the email hotline at the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem.
DUBNOV: Ah, very recently we had a good suggestion for “baby leaves,” for salad. Seems to be really well formatted, and we really need a word for ‘baby leaves’. If you go to supermarket, go to vegetables and look for that, there is no word but Baby.
ESTRIN: Israelis just call it “baby?”
DUBNOV: Yeah, in all the stores, which is very unclear to a Hebrew speaker, I think.
ESTRIN: Yeah, are you buying leaves, or buying a baby?
DUBNOV: yeah…
Keren liked the shopper’s suggestion for “baby lettuce,” so she passed it along to the Committee for Words in Daily Use. The Academy eventually decided to call it “alalim.” Yes, it took a while to come up with a Hebrew term for baby lettuce. But that’s not so bad, considering that just 100 years ago, most people didn’t speak Hebrew at all – except to God. Today, Hebrew’s come a long way.
(sound montage of Hebrew radio news, rap song, conversation)
BIRNBAUM: It is really unprecedented. There is no example in the history of languages, that a language that was really not spoken for 1700 years, being revived and being a language of all spheres of life. There’s no example of this anywhere in the world.
Gabriel Birnbaum is a senior researcher at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. He says there are a few examples of revitalized languages around the world – Maori in New Zealand, Welsh in Wales. But their success pales in comparison to Hebrew.
BIRNBAUM: So now of course the question is why, and why it happened.
Birnbaum attributes the success of the Hebrew revival to a few factors. Initially, it seems, it was simply a matter of necessity.
BIRNBAUM: The people who were here already, and the people who came newly, they came from so many places! There were at least 4-5 totally different communities of Jews. One community speaking Arabic, the other speaking Ladino, the third speaking Yiddish, the other maybe speaking Persian. And they didn’t even mix with each other. The only thing, they said, sometimes in the marketplace, they met each other. Because they had to buy things. And there they had to speak to each other. So they started to speak a little Hebrew.
But marketplace talk wasn’t enough to revive a whole language. The real push came from a 23 year old immigrant from Lithuania who thought that Jews returning to their ancestral homeland should speak their ancestral language. His name?.
(Hebrew song – “Eliezer Ben Yehuda…”)
This Israeli hit of the 1970s celebrating Eliezer Ben Yehuda calls him “an amusing Jew.” That’s an understatement. His contemporaries thought he was completely crazy. The last time anyone spoke Hebrew in day to day conversation was probably back in the 2nd century, a few decades after the Romans destroyed the second temple, and the exiled Israelites abandoned Hebrew for other languages. By the turn of the 20th century, Zionists were publishing periodicals in Hebrew, but nobody was really speaking it for day to day conversation. That is, until Ben Yehuda arrived in Jerusalem in 1881. His efforts began at home – he and his wife took an oath to speak Hebrew and only Hebrew in the house. And then, along came their son, Itamar. Being the first Hebrew speaking baby didn’t make for such a happy childhood.
BIRNBAUM: He says here in his memoirs, that one of the things — he just wanted to go out, to play with the children, to see the birds, to see the flowers…
But his father kept him on a tight leash. After all, the neighborhood kids spoke French, Russian, Yiddish, Arabic. So they were just a bad influence. So were the adults.
BIRNBAUM: He tried to avoid that his child, his son, would never hear any other language beside Hebrew. But many important people came to him who couldn’t speak Hebrew. So what he did, they put him to sleep very early every evening, yes, so he wouldn’t hear anything that was spoken in Yiddish or in other languages.
Ben Yehuda managed to convince a few other families to take the Hebrew oath. He started a Hebrew newspaper. Except there was no Hebrew word for newspaper. So he made one up – Iton. He went on to coin hundreds of new words, from ice cream and omelet, to soldier and bicycle. He’d slip the words into his newspaper articles, and readers would adopt them. And he formed a Hebrew Language Committee – which published lists of new words for the Jewish community. That committee was the predecessor to today’s Academy of the Hebrew Language. Researcher Gabriel Birnbaum says coining and voting on new words is the easy part. Getting Israelis to actually adopt them is a whole other story.
BIRNBAUM: There’s lot of blunders, if you can call it that…I mean, we have at least 100,000 words, and many, many of them are – they are just not used, because it’s very difficult to change people’s linguistic habits. I mean, we had a beautiful word for ringtone – it’s a very new thing – “neimon” — but it doesn’t seem to catch.
The Academy has language counselors that work with radio and TV newsrooms. Whenever there’s a new word, they encourage editors to include it in the broadcast. Sometimes the editors agree, and the word slowly trickles down from the anchor to the masses. But more often than not, the new word ends up on the cutting room floor.
Talking to people on the street, you start to see what the Academy is up against.
WOMAN1: From what I have heard, I don’t think there is a point. I think they are just wasting their time and resources. If there is an academy for making up new words, that’s kind of pathetic.
WOMAN2: They’re not very important for our lives…and they make stupid words.
Some ultra-Orthodox Jews are particularly outraged by the whole project. In fact, they objected to the use of Hebrew from the very beginning. To them, modernizing the Holy Tongue was blasphemous. So they stoned Ben Yehuda’s house and excommunicated his family in protest; today much of the community sticks to Yiddish. But the Academy still keeps busy. Israelis are constantly making up new words themselves, and the language hotline receives suggestions almost daily.
ESTRIN: How many emails did you get today?
DUBNOV: 30 and the day’s not over.
ESTRIN: Wow.
DUBNOV: It’s regular.
People write in wanting help naming their babies, composing their wedding invitations, and proofreading tombstone inscriptions. Book publishers want to know official spellings, lawyers want to know official grammar. And Keren spends hours writing back to each and every one of them.
DUBNOV: Here, people are completely in love with their language. They ask all the time. Many of them trust the Academy as if it was Hashem – God.
(more noise of Keren typing emails)
The revival of Hebrew may be one of the most successful linguistic experiments of modern times. That said, if Moses rose from his grave and visited Israel today, he’d need a translator. There are 8000 different words written in the Bible…but there are about 80,000 words in a modern Hebrew dictionary. It seems that Israelis have more to talk about than just covenants, cherubs and concubines.
For The World, I’m Daniel Estrin, in Jerusalem.
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