1212: Hebrew's Origins Apr 4, 2018

It is hard to give a year for when any language began. With French for instance, there are certainly periods when there was rapid change between Latin, Vulgar Latin, then Old French and so on, but any linguist would be hard-pressed to give an exact year, let alone a month or even a day. The one exception to this for any natural language is Modern Hebrew, which began on October 13th, 1881, when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his friends decided to only speak to each other in Hebrew. up until then, there were over 1,500 years of linguistic inactivity, except in rituals and other special circumstances, in the same as Latin might be thought of today. Ben-Yehuda created the Committee of the Hebrew language, and wrote the first modern dictionary for the language, and often he is credited as the source for revitalization. He realized the importance of a national language for the purposes of solidarity and nationalism (in this case Zionism). This was as a replacement for Yiddish, which was—at the time—assumed to be the language for the future Jewish nation by his contemporary Zionists.