It’s not fully constructed, but it was dead as an everyday language. It became a clerical/liturgical language like how Catholics use Latin. It was like that for centuries while Jews adopted European languages, Arabic, or integrated Hebrew into languages creating things like Yiddish and Ladino. Hebrew got revived as a spoken language in the late 19th century by some of the first Jewish settlers in Ottoman Palestine.
Something I’ve always found interesting though is how modern Hebrew was revived in order to eliminate Yiddish, but in doing so there’s a bunch of Yiddish features of modern Hebrew. I’ve always wondered how different things might have turned out had Arabic speaking Jews revived Hebrew instead.
But yeah modern Hebrew was Jurassic Park’d back into existence, even including the part of integrating stuff into it’s DNA
It’s not fully constructed, but it was dead as an everyday language. It became a clerical/liturgical language like how Catholics use Latin. It was like that for centuries while Jews adopted European languages, Arabic, or integrated Hebrew into languages creating things like Yiddish and Ladino. Hebrew got revived as a spoken language in the late 19th century by some of the first Jewish settlers in Ottoman Palestine.
Something I’ve always found interesting though is how modern Hebrew was revived in order to eliminate Yiddish, but in doing so there’s a bunch of Yiddish features of modern Hebrew. I’ve always wondered how different things might have turned out had Arabic speaking Jews revived Hebrew instead.
But yeah modern Hebrew was Jurassic Park’d back into existence, even including the part of integrating stuff into it’s DNA
Interesting, thank you!