Entraînement 2 : The Man Who Brought Hebrew Back

mother tongue — שפת אם. lullaby — שיר ערש. convinced — משוכנע. unite — לאחד. furious — זועם. native speaker — דובר ילידי, שזו שפת האם שלו. is credited with — מייחסים לו את. official languages — שפות רשמיות. committee — ועד, ועדה. Russian Empire — האימפריה הרוסית. Academy of the Hebrew Language — האקדמיה ללשון העברית. apps — אפליקציות.

In 1881, a young man stepped off a ship in Jaffa with his wife and a strange plan. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, then twenty-three, had decided that he and his family would speak only Hebrew. At the time, this seemed almost crazy. For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew had been the language of prayer and study, read and written by Jews all over the world, but it was nobody's mother tongue. No child went to sleep hearing a Hebrew lullaby.

Ben-Yehuda was born Eliezer Perlman in 1858, in a small town in the Russian Empire, in what is today Belarus. As a boy he studied in a religious school, where he learned to read ancient Hebrew texts. Later, as a student in Paris, he became convinced that the Jewish people needed not only a land of their own, but also a living language to unite them.

When his first son, Ben-Zion, was born in Jerusalem in 1882, Ben-Yehuda made a decision that many of his neighbours found shocking. The boy would hear no language but Hebrew. Visitors who did not speak it were asked to stay away from him, and Ben-Yehuda is said to have been furious when he once heard his wife singing a Russian song. Ben-Zion, who later changed his name to Itamar Ben-Avi, is often described as the first native speaker of modern Hebrew.

There was a practical problem, too: ancient Hebrew had no words for many things in modern life. Ben-Yehuda spent decades searching old texts for forgotten words, and inventing new ones when he found none. Among the words he is credited with are milon, "dictionary", and iton, "newspaper". His great work, a dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, was so huge that it was completed only in 1959, decades after his death.

It would be wrong, however, to give one man all the credit. Historians point out that Hebrew became a living language mainly because of schools. In the new Jewish villages, teachers began to teach every subject in Hebrew, and children who learned it at school brought it home to their parents. By 1922, the year Ben-Yehuda died, Hebrew had become one of the three official languages of the country under British rule, together with English and Arabic.

Today, millions of people speak Hebrew in their daily lives, and new immigrants learn it in ulpan classes all over Israel. Every year, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which grew out of a committee that Ben-Yehuda helped to found, suggests new Hebrew words for things such as apps and online meetings. The language that once seemed frozen in old books is still growing.