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An octolingual blogsite couldn´t do otherwise, but pay a tribute to the "bizarro" hebrew who achieved one of the paramount linguistic deeds of the XXth Century: to revive (we could even say "resurrect") one of the oldest languages in the world and it make it become the daily, economic, milatary and administration language of a new-born State and in fact one which would experience a harsh, difficult and risky-life (to make this experiment even more valid): Eliezer Ben Yehuda.
EBY, born in Belarus and dead in the Holy Land (in what then was the turkish Ottoman Empire) was a filologue, activistist, hebrew teacher, journalist, founder of the first hebrew newspaper and the first modern hebrew dictionary, but neither of this definitions fully defines what is so fascinating to us of him.
The real and epic "bizarry" of this modern genius was to be born in a slavic country (where people spoke lithuanian, polish or russian) moving to the Middle East (where people spoke turkish, arab, yiddish or german) and deciding that at home, ever since then, they were only going to speak Hebrew (which nobody spoke, back then).
Furthermore, the epic doesn´t finish here, it just starts. Ever since then (we may say even before) he concludes that the future state of Israel or Sion (that back then was nothing more of a dream, like a dream it was at the time the idea of independent arab countries)would only be possible if the israelis or zionists spoke hebrew.
To have an idea of what a crazy idea it was, back then hebrew was nothing more than a liturgic language (such as latin is today). The Jews in the Middle East, if there was something they spoke, that was arab, or turk, or german, or yiddish (a mixture of german, hebrew and slavic language) and those to come would only speak french, english, polish or russian, whatever. Whatever except Hebrew.
But this bizarro and crazy man just sticked to his idea that the only thing that could be spoken in a future, bizarro and imagined Zion state in order for it to be stable, was that: hebrew. We don´t want to speak here on the complications and the confrontations of the creation of this state: we just want to stick to the fascinating in the man we are talking about here.
Noy yet satisfied having told everyone his decision (for which he was taken as an outlandish and even crazy man) he started publishing his own newspaper in hebrew, his own dictionary, and what was to become a symbol: to raise his son as the first Native-Hebrew speaker. Itamar Ben Avi (Eliezer´s son) was indeed to become the first child to speak hebrew as mother tongue in nothing less than two thousand years.
Itamar, the son, later followed his father´s steps, he collaborated is the fist journal in hebrew, he was pro-independence, etc, but without doubt the moust astounding fact in his life was that: he was the first kid in two thousand years to have Hebrew as mother tongue.
Today Israel was hebrew as his official language. There, many other languages are also spoken: English, Arab (official as well), Spanish, Russian (even to the point electoral propaganda is printed also in Russian, since 10-20% are also Russian speakers) but the main language is Hebrew, a language the grand-grand-parents, the grandparents, the parents and even the inhabitands of a great part of Israel had never spoken before. But that´s the language the all speak, nowadays. They have revived it. Resurrected, I may say.
Tell if this is not a bizarro fact, in the sense we have given to this word (weird and corageous), if it´s not bizarro the man himself (extremely bizarro) and if from a linguistical pointical of view as the one we have here, we ought not to give this man a tribute.
This goes for you, Ben Yehuda. Chutzpah, our congratulations.
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