17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3
vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4560 days ago
715 posts - 1527 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish
| Message 17 of 17 08 January 2014 at 7:49pm | IP Logged |
eyðimörk wrote:
beano wrote:
| Israel is the obvious example of a language coming back from the dead. Mind you, the majority language among the citizens of the newly-founded state was probably German. Perhaps that gave them an incentive to embrace Hebrew. |
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I would have thought that religious incentive was probably more a factor than not wanting to speak German. Zionism, sacred language (or language of the sacred, rather), sacred homeland... if Ireland was almost emptied and repopulated with religious extremists who viewed Irish as intrinsic for their bond with their deity, and their identity, and being able to read Irish was a requirement for various life stepping stones, and those were the people who created the new Celtic state of Ireland, then even the later, a bit more moderate, returning immigrants would probably learn Irish. They wouldn't need to hate English to do so.
NB! Yes, this is a very rough sketch of Israel's beginnings. It's extremely simplified, and I think we all know not all Israelis today, or even every single initial immigrant, were extreme Zionists. |
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Actually, Zionism was at its roots a secular movement, and religious Jews initially were very much opposed to both Zionism and the revival of Hebrew as an everyday spoken language (and support for one doesn't necessarily imply support for the other - Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was never too keen on Hebrew). There are still Orthodox Jewish groups in existence who maintain their opposition to both. In the view of the religious Jews it would have been sacrilegious to return to the Holy Land en masse before the arrival of the Messiah, as well as to use the Holy Language for mundane purposes.
I don't think antipathy towards German played a significant part either. It might have for the German Jews, most of whom spoke Standard German as a native language by the middle of the 20th century, but the majority of European Jews spoke Yiddish, which they no longer considered to be a form of German, not to mention all the non-Ashkenazic Jews who never spoke a Germanic language. Personally I think the biggest contributing factors to the success of the Hebrew revival project were that a) Hebrew never went out of use completely, and b) there was no other language common to all of the Jews. I've written about that in more detail here.
Edited by vonPeterhof on 08 January 2014 at 7:49pm
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