Hebrew, Alive and Well

French linguist Claude Hagège asserts:

...historically, many traces of extinct languages are transmitted to us by linguistic messages which accompany works of art. For instance, many old religious buildings, shrines, temples, churches contain inscriptions. Archaic mints exhibit carved words which keep traces of Latin, classical Greek, Pharaonic Egyptian, Sumerian, Coptic, Turkish, etc. Poems in Classical Chinese often accompany Chinese paintings. Finally, old forms of various languages are conserved in musical works in which the melody is accompanied by the words of one or another language...

...A language is declared to be dead when the last, generally old, people who still spoke it die without having transmitted it to their children and grandchildren. Thus the two, mutually related, criteria are: death of the last speakers and lack of transmission....

...To try to preserve a language is not a useless endeavor. Languages are much more than communication tools. When one tries to preserve something that existed before, it is far from being at the expense of new developments, nor does it by any means crowd us out of the crucial continuance of life...endangered languages are not obsolete systems that no society needs. They reflect various very interesting human cultures which make part of human civilization (as recalled in my “Language-Lover’s Dictionary of Languages,” French edition: Paris, Plon, 2009). Furthermore, they can be revived. When Hebrew became, by the collective decision of a human community, the language of a state, it had disappeared from spoken usage two millenaries earlier. Just because they express endlessly varying identities, human languages do not fall into oblivion when they fall into disuse...

...To some extent, languages can be seen as living species which, like other such species, face extinction, but the “activities of the too-successful human species” cannot themselves be the factor leading to the extinction of languages, since languages are part of the very definition of the human species. This is the reason why most human societies have always cared for dead languages, by keeping traces and testimonies, like the countless texts in Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Latin, and even Sumerian, Pharaonic Egyptian, Geez (old Ethiopic), Classical Chinese, etc. It is therefore not quite true that human societies are powerless against “mortality and the inevitability of uncontrollable change.” If it were true, how could Hebrew have been revived to become the language of the state of Israel today, knowing that it had become extinct as early as the sixth century BC, when it was replaced by Aramaic, the language which Yeoshua of Nazareth spoke, like all other Jews, his contemporaries? There are, besides most of the Bible itself, countless texts in Classical Hebrew. The “only” thing which was needed, in order to revive a language whose death went back to such a remote past, was an enormously strong collective human will. This is exactly what happened in Palestine in the first decades of the XXth century!

Amazing that Hebrew is as it is.

Not really, despite our Exile from the national homeland, we kept our national identity alive.

We willed it.


I left this comment there:

Hagège asks: "how could Hebrew have been revived to become the language of the state of Israel today, knowing that it had become extinct as early as the sixth century BC..." and responds that what was needed was "...,an enormously strong collective human will. This is exactly what happened in Palestine in the first decades of the XXth century!".

Well, in Hebrew, that country would be Eretz-Yisrael, the Land of Israel. We Jews carried our culture, literature, ritual, religion and national consciousness with us in our Exile and all of it was in Hebrew, the language of the Bible, the Midrash and the Mishnah and after the Talmudic Aramaic period, the Geonim (5th-10 century commentators), Rishonim (11-15th century) and Achronim (16th - current). All this great body of text was in Hebrew. Palestine was a foreign Latin name of Roman origin.

And incidentally, is it not odd that Arabs who insist on being referred to as "Palestinians" have no real Arabic name for their supposed homeland?

P.S.

and let's do Yiddish with him:

...American English chutzpah comes from Yiddish, which borrowed it from Hebrew, in which it referred to the attitude of a person who, having killed his parents, throws himself on the mercy of the court saying he is a poor orphan. English could ofcourse translate this word by “shameless audacity,” “presumption-plus-arrogance,” “brazen nerve” and the like. However, only the word in its original (Hebraic) form contains the whole richness of this concept, and all the implications linked with Yiddish humor, so that it is much more significant and suggestive as a loanword than when it is translated...We can conclude that concepts for which no word exists in a given language are often those which do not appear as nameworthy in the culture reflected by this language....