Eliezer ben yehuda: The father of modern hebrew (Advanced Level ”Totachim”) | Learn Hebrew for Free with Ulpan Integraliah

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For the revival of the Hebrew language, one of the most remarkable socio-linguistic events of modern times is characterized by the figure of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman, in the Lithuanian village of Luzhky on January 7, 1858.
He left Russia in 1878 for Paris to study medicine, with the aim of being a future help to the Jewish community in Palestine. However, due to his own health problems (tuberculosis), Ben-Yehuda was unable to continue his studies, but, to his eternal credit, he did not waver in his convictions, and in 1881 he arrived in Palestine (Israel before 1948) with his revival plans for Hebrew language.
Ben-Yehuda settled in Jerusalem, where most Jews in Palestine lived in their various communities, planning to use the city as a base to spread his ideas of renewal throughout Palestine and the Diaspora.
Ben-Yehuda adopted several action plans. The main ones were presented in three parts, and can be summarized as "Hebrew at home", "Hebrew at school", and "words, words, words".
Ben-Yehuda wanted the Jews of Palestine to speak exclusively Hebrew. Therefore, when his first son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda (better known as Ittamar Ben-Avi), was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda promised his first wife Deborah to raise the boy as the first Hebrew-speaking child in modern history.
According to Ben-Yehuda, this was a very important symbolic event for the future of the Hebrew revival, because with a child in the house, parents and visitors should speak to him naturally, and converse about the most everyday topics, in Hebrew. And when the child would finally begin to speak on his own, Ben-Yehuda would have living proof that a complete awakening of the language was indeed possible.
And that is indeed what happened. Ittamar Ben-Avi, in his autobiography, describes some of the drastic precautions taken by Ben-Yehuda to ensure that his son would hear - and therefore finally speak - only Hebrew.
Indeed, the child did not begin speaking until the relatively late age of four.
The fact that there was a child in the house accentuated the need to find appropriate Hebrew words for the mundane things of daily life. Thus, new Hebrew words were invented by Ben-Yehuda for objects such as dolls, ice cream, jelly, omelette, handkerchief, towel, bicycle, and hundreds of others. As the child grew, Hebrew developed, both in vocabulary and in the naturalness of expression. Indeed, Ben-Yehuda and his Hebrew-speaking family became a living legend, an embodiment of rebirth for others.

 

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