Language in Time of Revolution by Benjamin Harshav

by Benjamin Harshav

Russian Book. Tekst. 477. 2008. Hardcover.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Judaica

Hardcover

First published July 7, 1993

Reviews

[Charlene Mathe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our generation has witnessed the miracle of Israel--the return of the people to the Land, raising the flag of their own sovereign state, and speaking the revived national language of Hebrew. In this 220-page book, the brilliant scholar Benjamin Harshav provides human dimension to this great miracle as it played out in the lives of the New Yishuv. It is the story of how a common Hebrew language emerged in the children that grew up in the Hebrew schools, and the contending social and linguistic traditions that were part of the transformation. Harshav makes a great contribution through his account and analysis of this period. I strongly recommend his book for anyone interested in the history of modern Israel and the emergence of modern Hebrew.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of this book is an essay about Jews and modernism, which has nothing that Slezkine's later book does not also have. The second part is an essay about the origin of spoken Israeli Hebrew. Hebrew began to be spoken in Ottoman Palestine by members of the Second Aliyah, revolutionaries who wanted to reject their Diaspora Jewish heritage and make themselves into New Hebrews, in the late 1900s through the 1910s. Their children picked it up and made it into their native language, like the children of Caribbean slaves who picked up the broken language their parents spoke with the overseers and made it into creoles. Prior to that and concurrently with it, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda coined many neologisms and started writing a dictionary, several novelists such as Mendele the Book Peddler (who was also the grandfather of Yiddish literature) started writing novels in it, also adapting the language for the purpose, and Hebrew schools were established in Palestine. The language slowly made it into the public sphere in Tel Aviv, and was recognized by the British Mandate authorities as one of the official languages of Palestine. The end result was a language with mostly Semitic vocabulary and morphology, its phonology the lowest common denominator between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew, Semitic "micro-syntax" but European "macro-syntax"; this is similar to what other languages have gone through in the process of modernization.