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

On 20 June, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
(Dan Sulani:)
> >     It's my understanding that the considerations had a lot more to do
> > with ideology than practicality.
(Thomas R. Wier:)
> 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.
I totally agree.
My point was that ideology played the "totalitarian role",
since the government at the time was in the hands of either
Turkish-speaking rulers (pre-World War I ) or English-speaking
rulers (the Mandatory period prior to the declaration of
the state of Israel.) It wasn't so much convincing the leaders
of the Zionist movement to "force something on the people"
as it was to convince them to add Hebrew-use as part of the
ideology and convince the masses that it _was_ part of the ideology.
People took ideology extremely seriously in those days
(they still do, but it's weakening --- I doubt that many people would
take to the streets over differences of ideology these days.).
    IMHO, the difference was that in the cases of language
revival which don't succeed, the percentage of ideologically motivated
people in the country is relatively small,
even if part of that percentage consists
of the government. In the case of Hebrew, the ideological base
was, as I understand it, far more widespread.
    Although the educational institutions pushed the spread of
Hebrew, there were --- and are to this day --- communities
who were allowed to set up their own schools where the
teaching would be in the lang of their choice.
    It ends up as a matter of "critical mass". And this
is where practicality comes in regarding the case of Hebrew,
IMHO. When enough monolingual speakers speak the revived lang,
the other communities are not forced in any way to give up their own lang,
but they _will_ pick it up as a matter of necessity. The Ultra-Orthodox, for
example, were very insistant on not using Hebrew for daily use.
Today it is not uncommon for them to speak Hebrew, and even
write their newspapers in Hebrew. And this change came about
without any totalitarion coercion on the part of the government.
Just a simple case of: if you want to speak to them and they're
not likely to learn your lang, you had better learn theirs!


>The fact is that Hebrew had more than
> just iconicity: it *also* had substantial pragmatic differences
> from most cases of language obsolescence.
I  agree with this also.


>
> > >(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.
And I think that I was also misunderstood:

> Note what I said
> was:  "in many ways".
 To which I did not object --- in fact, I quite agree!

> 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.
Nor do I.

What I was trying to say was that I disagree
with the statement that modern Israeli Hebrew
is  "not at all like"
the Hebrew from the time of King David.
English is "not at all like" Georgian, for example.
Japanese is "not at all like" Chinese.
My point was that, despite the
differences, [which I do agree exist!]
modern Israeli Hebrew is still very similar
to the Hebrew from King David's time! So similar,
in fact, that schoolchildren can read it with minimal help!

>
> 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.
Perhaps that was a bad comparison. I was trying to compare
differences between Elizabethan and modern English, not
between prose and poetry.

>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?

Not in this case. I  was referring to reading
Joshua and Judges in 4th grade and the books of
Samuel and Kings in the 5th grade. Now everybody
knows about Joshua and Jericho, but how widespread
is the general knowledge of the two battles at Ha'Ai,
or the war with the northern kings, etc. Maybe everybody
knows, from general culture, about Samson, but how many
know what Ehud did? Etc. There is a lot of material that isn't
absorbed from the general culture. My point was that, kids in
4th and 5th grade can read this straight from the Bible,
with only a few notes as to grammatical differences
and vocabulary because the Hebrew they speak
 _is_  so much like the Hebrew used in the Bible!


Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a

A word is an awesome thing.