sometimes i remember that hebrew was literally a dead language. dead!! for two thousand years!!!! until this one guy in the 1880′s was like hey fuck german and russian and spanish and french We Are Jews we should speak The Language Of The Jews!! and everyone was like dude tf hebrew is DEAD it’s OLD it’s missing too many words, we can’t use it. so he was like ok. i’ll make up new ones. checkmate, atheists and he fuckninh did he stood up by his little desk (?) and invented so many new words and wrote a whole dictionary and then he had a child and only spoke hebrew to him and that child was the first person who’s first language was hebrew in two thousand years and…………………………… i’m sorry i’m so emotional over my man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. he singe-handedly revived a dead language. what a man
NOT single-handedly! His wife Hemda worked her ass off alongside him. She did the childcare (in a language that wasn’t her first and they were, as you said, having to come up with new words for!), she made that ‘little desk’ possible, she campaigned to get her husband and father out of fucking jail when their newspaper was accused of inciting rebellion, she networked with other scholars, she was a journalist, she worked on reviving Hebrew alongside her husband and continued the dictionary work after his death, and she put together a committee to make sure the dictionary would grow after her own death too!
And none of their work was in a vacuum! We might not have gotten modern Hebrew going as quickly and as strongly without them as we did, but they were inspired by and drew help from Jewish people who were already speaking Hebrew in daily life, and shared their work with contemporary enthusiasts. Hemda and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did a mountain of work and they did not do it alone.
