In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES (16 page)

By about
A.D.
200, Hebrew had died as a spoken language. It survived as a liturgical language and as a written language for philosophy, poetry, and other elite intellectual pursuits. In 1881, when Ben-Yehuda and his wife, Devora, immigrated to Palestine from Europe, Hebrew also served as a sort of lingua franca of the marketplace for Jews from various language backgrounds, but it was nobody's mother tongue. In 1882, when Ben-Yehuda's first
child was born, he declared that his household would be Hebrew speaking only, and thus raised the first native Hebrew speaker in over a thousand years. His friends thought the child was sure to be damaged by the experiment. His neighbors thought he was crazy. But three generations later their own great-grandchildren would be living their lives in Hebrew—at home, at school, at the beach, and in the sandwich shops.

Ben-Yehuda and Zamenhof grew up at the same time under similar circumstances (Ben-Yehuda in Russian-ruled Lithuania, and Zamenhof in Russian-ruled Poland). Both were deeply affected by the results of nationalist sentiment spreading through Europe. Zamenhof saw how it turned man against man and inspired people to violence. Ben-Yehuda saw how it strengthened and legitimized a feeling of common identity. Both saw that a fundamental element of a sense of nationhood was a shared language.

Unlike the Germans, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and other peoples who asserted themselves as nations during this time by uniting and throwing off, or attempting to throw off, foreign rule, the Jews were a widely spread diaspora without a significant, nation-worthy concentration in any particular territory. Many of them felt that if they were to define themselves as a nation, they must relocate. Ben-Yehuda believed that they must also revive their ancient language, and he relocated to Palestine to begin his task.

After the terrible pogroms of 1881, Zamenhof also came to the conclusion that the Jews needed a state of their own. After first supporting the idea for a Jewish homeland in the United States, he began an active involvement in the Zionist movement. But he became disillusioned with it and decided that “despite the heartbreaking sufferings of my people, I do not want to link myself
with Hebrew nationalism, but I want to work only for absolute human justice. I am profoundly convinced, that this way I will bring much more good to my unfortunate people than through the goals of nationalism.”

Just as the growth of Esperanto was aided by fervent true believers who didn't care what others thought of them, Hebrew benefited from a passionate idealism. Ben-Yehuda was criticized for being a naive dreamer, and even when he could convince associates to use Hebrew in their day-to-day interactions, they were met with an impatient request to speak Yiddish “like a normal person.”

Yiddish was the language of the European Ashkenazi Jews, and many of them argued that Yiddish should be the language of Jewish nationhood. Had they established a territory in Europe or the United States, rather than in Palestine, this is probably what would have happened. But in Palestine there were North African Jews, who spoke North African Arabic; Mediterranean Sephardic Jews, who spoke Judeo-Spanish; and local Jews, who spoke Palestinian Arabic. There were already significant cultural differences between these Jews and the Yiddish-speaking European Jews, who were viewed as not-always-welcome newcomers.

Ben-Yehuda saw that Hebrew was shared more broadly by the Diaspora and had more potential as a unifying force. His writings and actions inspired a small group of others to follow his lead. A few other families declared themselves Hebrew-only households, and a few more declared that they personally would only use Hebrew in all their daily interactions. These were the early years of the first aliya, an influx of over twenty thousand immigrants from Europe, and as they established small agricultural colonies in a new, strange place, many of them were receptive to new language habits. Some teachers began to teach Hebrew in these colonies
through the direct method—just jumping in and speaking the language, without commentary or explanation in Yiddish, Russian, or any other better-known language.

They were all, to a certain extent, making it up as they went along. How do you say, in a language of obscure theological debate and ancient ritual, “washcloth” or “doll” or “typewriter”? If Ben-Yehuda wanted to do something as simple as ask his wife to pour him a cup of coffee with sugar, he was reduced to gesturing while saying, “Take such and such, and do like so, and bring me this and this, and I will drink.” It takes a lot of work and patience to run a household or a classroom this way.

Some conscious intervention was required. Ben-Yehuda would comb through ancient Hebrew texts, looking for long-forgotten words that might serve for the needed concepts. He also looked through more recent Hebrew literature, which had already done a good bit of grappling with vocabulary gaps. But the solutions that had been proposed in this literature were often too conservative, clunky, and inappropriate for natural, fluent language use. A tuning fork was referred to as “a bronze fork with two teeth that produce a sound.” A word for “telegraph” had been coined by adapting the following lines from Psalm 19:4—5: “There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.”

Ben-Yehuda sought simple, natural-sounding solutions, and he often resorted to making them up himself. Others did the same, and this led to a great deal of variation in the way Hebrew was spoken. A newspaper editorial complained: “Here they say
gir
‘chalk’ and here
neter
and here
karton
. This one says
xeret
‘letter’ and this one
mixtav
. One says
shemurat
ayin
or
af’ af
for ‘eyelash’ and another,
risim
. In one school it is called a
bima
‘teacher's podium,’
in another a
katedra
and in another a
maxteva
. This one says
sargel
‘ruler’ and that one
sirgal
, this one
safsel
and that one
safsal
.” Pronunciation also varied between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic styles.

Though language academies were established in 1890 and 1904, they accomplished very little in the way of top-down enforcement of language norms. There was no standard or accepted authority. Though Ben-Yehuda introduced many of the words he created into general circulation by using them in articles he wrote for his Hebrew-language newspapers, he did not draw attention to them or comment upon them at all. Though the language was being manipulated quite consciously by individuals in various places, it was difficult to determine who was pulling the strings, and so the process managed to avoid seeming imposed and artificial.

Beginning in 1904, another wave of immigration from Europe, the second aliya, brought thousands more Jews to Palestine, many of them from Russia, where another bout of violent pogroms was under way. They were fired up on socialism and full of optimistic energy. Office clerks and doctors learned to plow soil and shovel manure on the newly established collective farms. Teachers and accountants built roads and laid foundations for new Jewish towns. These immigrants were willing to change their lives in dramatic ways, and many of them (but by no means all of them) were willing to change their language, too.

They made Hebrew the language of formal education in kindergartens and schools throughout Palestine. There were still a number of schools that used French, English, or German, but after the 1914 “language wars,” when teachers from schools across the land went on strike to protest the decision that German, not Hebrew, would be the language of instruction at the Technion
(a modern technical school recently established by a German Jewish charitable organization), Hebrew became the dominant language of education. The kids took it from there. As modern studies of the development of Creoles from pidgins, or of native sign languages from home sign systems, have shown, a generation (or two) of children can turn the effortfully produced, inconsistent input of the adults around them into a fully fledged, effortless native vernacular. The children of the second aliya were exposed to Hebrew early enough, and in a natural enough manner, that they were able to do this.

What accounts for the success of the revival of Hebrew? It certainly wasn't efforts on the part of any official institution. Putting a language into the schools or onto street signs is no guarantee of success (as illustrated by the Irish example). Nor was it a sense of cultural pride in the language. Maori (the native language of New Zealand) and Hawaiian fail to flourish, despite large-scale government support and a hearty emotional response from the people who are supposed to be reviving the languages (but aren't). In dozens of movements struggling to bring dying languages back to life, there have been people with passionate conviction working very hard. The revival of a language doesn't depend on one inspired crusader, or even a group of them. How do you get people to speak a language they don't speak? Invented or otherwise?

One thing that seems to be very important is circumstances—as in right time, right place. If the Jews had decided to establish a nation in Uganda or Texas (both serious proposals at the time), would they be speaking Hebrew today? Probably not. If the situation in Europe hadn't sent a second wave of immigrants to Palestine, would the small movement that Ben-Yehuda established have petered out? Perhaps.

Hebrew and Esperanto are very different languages with very different origins. But their successes—that of revival for Hebrew and that of being brought to life in the first place for Esperanto—overlapped in their timing and in their reasons for occurring. Esperanto also benefited from circumstances. If Zamenhof hadn't come on the scene just as the Volapilkists were jumping ship, would anyone have paid attention? If the situation in Europe hadn't highlighted the violent perils of nationalism, would so many have been attracted to his message of unity? If both the Hebrew revival and the Esperanto movements hadn't begun during the golden age of socialism, when the prospects for grand social-engineering experiments looked so bright, would the Jewish immigrants have so willingly believed that it was possible to overhaul the language habits of an entire society? Would enough people have believed in the utopian dream of a universal language to try to make it happen?

Only it didn't happen. Esperanto did not become a universal language. It became instead a particular language of a particular community.

Crank Pride

A
fter World War II, there was a push to rid the Esperanto movement of its eccentricities, spearheaded by Ivo Lapenna, a Yugoslavian Esperantist and academic lawyer. He held important positions: professor of international law at Zagreb University, counsel-advocate at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and professor of Soviet and East European law at the London School of Economics. Peter Forster, in his book
The Esperanto Movement
, described Lapenna as having “the sophistication of the cultured cosmopolitan.” He was “fluent in several languages” and had “distinguished himself as a sportsman and a musician.” You can imagine why such a genteel character might not be happy with the public image of Esperanto. After attending the 1947 universal congress in Bern, he published an angry plea for respectability, lashing out against
the “naivetés and frivolities which only compromise the cause of the International Language.” He complained that “the dissemination of Esperanto among serious people” was threatened by the “cranks” he had observed:

War's end had ushered in a new era of international communication and organization, and Lapenna did not want Esperanto to sabotage once again its chance to enter the world stage in an official capacity. Proposals for Esperanto endorsement after World War I had received serious consideration at the League of Nations. There was enough opposition (the most vocal from the French delegation, which claimed that French was already the universal language) to prevent the League from taking up the cause of Esperanto, though it did accept a resolution to recommend that it be considered a regular language, rather than a code, in the determination of fees for telegraph messages.