ninme

The Times - Remember 1882, as the Cornish say
Past Notes: if the Cornish are to revive their language, they should take a history lesson, by Graham Stewart

Apparently the Cornish want EU recognition of their language. Which, of course, I’m all for.

It is here that their ambition fails them. For, if the greatest modern example of language revival is any guide, the place to start is not the classroom but the cradle.

For inspiration, they may need to recall that in 1882 a boy was born who was singled out for a special purpose. His father, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, had decided that he would be the first person in two millennia able to speak only Hebrew.

Although Hebrew remained the language of the sacred texts, Jews had effectively ceased speaking it to one another nearly two thousand years previously. A convinced Zionist, Ben-Yehuda was determined to restore it as the bonding idiom of Jews returning to their promised land. The indoctrination would start with his son.

In doing so, he instituted a strict regime whereby the boy was isolated from the rest of the community and only Hebrew would be spoken in the home. This was rather hard on Mrs Ben-Yehuda, who scarcely understood what her husband was saying. It was not even that easy for the great man himself. He had to devise absurdly convoluted sentences to ask for everyday things for which ossified Hebrew lacked the vocabulary.

Unsurprisingly, little Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda reached the age of 4 without saying anything. The catalyst came when his mother absent-mindedly sang a lullaby in her native Russian. His father, realising the experiment had just been contaminated, flew into a rage.

This so frightened the boy that he called out to his father to stop. To everyone’s relief, he shouted it in Hebrew. The first modern native speaker in two millennia had uttered.

Nor did he stop. Meanwhile, his father began work on a New Hebrew dictionary that quickly took off with the new wave of Jewish immigrants arriving in the Holy Land after 1900. What began as a useful lingua franca received a boost when in 1922 its promoters persuaded the British to accord it an official language status in Palestine. It is now the mother tongue for more than seven million Israelis.

Fun!