In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [39]
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