In revived Hebrew, an ancient word for hyena came to mean cheetah
When Hebrew was brought back as an everyday language, old words were drafted into new jobs. Bardelas, a hyena in the Mishnah, became the cheetah; the word for jujube became plum; and an Aramaic adjective for a trodden trail became the ordinary word for road. The result is often called history's most successful language revival.
Hebrew was the spoken tongue of the Israelites and flourished in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, roughly 1200 to 586 BCE. It gradually gave way to Aramaic and, after the devastating Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 136 CE, died out as anyone's mother tongue somewhere between 200 and 400 CE. For more than a millennium and a half it survived in prayer, poetry, scholarship and letters, while Jews spoke Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish and other languages.
In the late 19th century the Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda championed its return as a home language, partly to preserve its literature and partly to express a distinct Jewish national identity. He built the modern standard from about 8,000 biblical words and 20,000 from rabbinic commentary. The new language combined biblical roots, Mishnaic spelling and grammar and Sephardic pronunciation. Early adoption owed much to organisations backed by Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and to official status under the British Mandate in 1922. Despite Ben-Yehuda's fame, the poet Haim Nahman Bialik coined more new words than anyone.
Arabic, a Semitic cousin, supplied many loans: words for socks, mint, apricot, coriander and hummus, plus much of today's slang. Structurally the language kept its Semitic engine, building verbs and most nouns from three-consonant roots slotted into fixed patterns, and it is written right to left in a 22-letter consonant script with optional vowel marks. Word order drifted from the Bible's verb-first style to subject-verb-object.
Scholars argue about what exactly was revived. Haiim Rosen and Haim Blanc describe a koine blending older Hebrew, immigrants' native tongues and fresh growth, and the linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed calling it simply Israeli to reflect its mixed origins. A minority even see it as a hybrid with Indo-European, but most classify it firmly as Semitic. Today more than 10 million people speak it, over 6.5 million as a native language, and its development is guided by the Academy of the Hebrew Language.
Source: Modern Hebrew
