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For fifteen centuries, no child grew up speaking Hebrew

In collaboration with Poal (@poal.ivrit), the app for learning Hebrew. For more than fifteen centuries, Hebrew was prayed, studied and written, but nobody spoke it to their children. In Jerusalem in 1882, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda decided his son would hear nothing else. The words for daily life were missing, so they were forged from old roots. In 1913, the language won its war against German. Today, about nine million people argue, code and rap in it.

·Source: Midbar

*In collaboration with Poal (@poal.ivrit), the app for learning Hebrew.*

For more than fifteen centuries, no child grew up speaking Hebrew. The language wasn't dead: people prayed in it, studied in it and wrote letters in it. But nobody spoke it to their children.

## Jerusalem, 1882

That year, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had a son and decided the boy would hear nothing but Hebrew. The child, later known as Itamar Ben-Avi, became the first native speaker of modern Hebrew.

## New words from old roots

The words for daily life were missing. Ben-Yehuda forged them from old roots: milon (dictionary), iton (newspaper), glida (ice cream). The poet Yehuda Leib Gordon took hashmal, an obscure glow in Ezekiel's vision, and used it for electricity.

Ben-Yehuda forged them from old roots: milon (dictionary), iton (newspaper), glida (ice cream).

## The War of the Languages

In October 1913, the board of the engineering school in Haifa, the future Technion, picked German. Across the country, teachers and students walked out. In February 1914, the board turned back to Hebrew.

## A language you can learn

Today, about nine million people speak Hebrew. Its logic of three-letter roots is also what makes it learnable: that is what Poal teaches, root by root, for free, on iOS and Android.

#Hebrew#Ivrit#BenYehuda#Israel#History#LearnHebrew#Poal#Midbar

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For fifteen centuries, no child grew up speaking Hebrew | Midbar