Reviving a Language

An example of victory - Modern Hebrew

Rebirth of Hebrew

The hebrew was a tongue found in incriptions of the 8th century before Christ and ended up being preserved in the hebrew Bible, as a sacred tongue. With the Diáspora, the jewish people dispersed through the worlds territory, which caused the language to get lost. With the Sionism, during the nineteenth century, the jewish people returned to their homeland (Israel); the objective of the moviment wasn't to revive the language, but the jewish nacionalism became so strong that movements to restablish the hebew as the official tongue. In 1948 the State of Israel was foundedwith the hebrew as the official language. At the time, the translations were extremely important to reborn the Hebrew, due to the lack of modern vocabulary and to the many meaningless words. Then, started a process in which it a few numbers of linguistic loan were necessary for current expressions and the recreation of meaning for words that didn’t have it.

The most important precursors od the rebirth of the Hebrew language:

  • Ben-Yehuda: was known as ressuscitator of hebrew. He was a journalist and linguist that arrived at Israel in 1881 and attempted to persuade readers of a magazine to use the hebrew in their daily lives. He was the first one to elaborate a dictionary for the language;
  • Mendele, the bookseller: one of the most importante man of jewish litterature, lived is Russia during the diáspora. He used to write books in ídiche and than translate them himself to hebrew;
  • Chaim Bialik: the national poet ok Israel portrayed the life of the jews in the diáspora, being extremely critic;
  • Abraham Schlonsky: translator and poet, was very known to create new words. It is believed that this practice of him descended from his passion by the modernist poetic movement, that had great influence upon his work.