Re: THEORY: Hebrew revival (was: THEORY: Irish, and language death)

Quoting Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...>:

> On 19 June, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> <snip the interesting discussion on Gaelic>
>
> > Hebrew
> > is an exception to the general trend, and it is (to oversimply
> > somewhat) a result of having no one other language which all
> > Jews in Palestine could easily pick up without going to
> > great lengths
>
>     It's my understanding that the considerations had a lot more to do
> with ideology than practicality.
The problem is that in Ireland and in plenty of other dying
languages worldwide there is no sense a dearth of ideology.
Here's more of what King has to say about Irish:

  "Although by the late 19th century the Irish lanaguage
  seemed destined for extinction, it secured standing as
  a badge of community by becoming an icon of Irish
  identification, hinting at a lost romantic Celtic past....
  [t]he number of speakers has continued to decline [in the 20th
  century], and this in spite of an array of expensive
  government programs for encouraging the Irish to learn
  Irish.  For the generation after 1920 at least, schools
  that taught all subjects in Irish received an additional
  25% on the capitation grants paid to them by the government
  for each student.  Students writing examination papers
  in Irish were given bonus points of five to ten percent
  in various subjects.  There was every advantage to
  learning Irish.  But ultimately all of this availed
  nothing.  Nothing a well-motivated government attempted
  to do arrested the replacement of Irish by English....
  [t]he lesson to be drawn from the Irish case is that language
  iconicity is not enough to prevail against historical
  determinism; iconicity is a necessary but insufficient
  condition for the rescue of a language in decline.  It
  is hard to think of anything else the Irish government
  might have done to promote the Irish language." (p. 32-34)

The case of Irish is in fact fairly normal:  government
attempts to significantly alter linguistic behavior through
less than totalitarian means are almost always, almost without
exception, failures.  The fact is that Hebrew had more than
just iconicity: it *also* had substantial pragmatic differences
from most cases of language obsolescence.

> >(though note that it is in many ways a new
> > language, not at all like that of King David).
>
>     I beg to differ with the words "not at all like".
I think you've misunderstood what I said.  Note what I said
was:  "in many ways".  I made this comment based on the
comments of Hebrew experts here at the Oriental Institute,
and linguists in the UoC who have worked on Hebrew.  Their
opinion is that, *in many ways* (i.e., not in all ways),
modern Hebrew behaves more like a Eastern European language
in terms of the kinds of basic word order, the productivity
of its morphology, etc. subtle syntactic possibilities.

[I really do not want to get into a debate about this.  If
you wish to dispute this opinion, please do so with those
people, not me.]

> Yes, there _are_ differences, but Israeli
> schoolchildren can read the Hebrew of
> King David's time at least as easily, if not more
> easily, than English-speaking schoolchildren
> can read Shakespeare, let alone the English
> of Chaucer!
Are those really comparable texts? Much of the Hebrew
Bible is prose, and though elegant, it is nothing like
reading Shakespeare was even to one of Shakespeare's
contemporaries, and certainly not at all like reading
prose essays like _Areopagitica_ by Milton.  Also,
don't you think the very fact that Bible stories are
so universally known, even by many nonreligious people,
aids the young student on their first attempt at reading
the original Biblical text?  As well known as Shakespeare
is, most high school students couldn't tell you the ins
and outs of _Titus Andronicus_ or _Timon of Athens_ in the
same way any child could tell you what happened to Samson
and Delilah, or Moses and Pharaoh, or Noah and his Ark.
I simply don't see how you can compare these two bodies
of work.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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