Mother Tongue
This morning, I let the radio run on into the BBC news hour. Once they’d got past the actual news for the day, they pulled out a story about an Israeli who is upset that speakers are corrupting modern Hebrew, borrowing terms and grammar from other languages. (I didn’t catch his credentials. He might be a linguist, but I couldn’t chase down the BBC story to listen to it more closely. Casting about the internet, it looks like he might be in the Israeli Parliament. Or he might just be some guy with a bug up his butt.) To some degree, I can sympathize; while language drift is inescapable, we can still be inconvenienced by, and complain about, its ongoing blurring of meaning.
The linguistic purist featured on the show takes things a little too far, however. His solution? Israel should restrict itself purely to ancient Hebrew. When the BBC intereviewer skeptically asked how ancient Hebrew—which he perversely kept calling “biblical” Hebrew—could function adequately in the modern world, the scholar smugly replied that classical Hebrew is a “very rich” language. He did not elaborate.
Color me unconvinced. Linguistically rich as it may be, I have a hard time thinking the Talmud can supply us directly with the vocabulary we need to discuss radiation, microbes, representative democracy, penguins, longitude, chopsticks, surrealism, and countless other examples of things unknown to the ancient Israelites. It can, of course, provide us indirectly with such a vocabulary, with a little finagling. Modern Hebrew was constructed just so: there was no word for “satellite” at the launching of Sputnik, but a satellite is something that circles the earth; the moon circles the earth; so the word for satellite becomes “moon,” or “moonlet,” or “signal-moon” or some such. If, in the name of preserving essential culture, you don’t want to import a foreign word, this method of creating its equivalent is perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, this too would not satisfy our would-be language policeman.
By way of example as to why ancient Hebrew is all the language anybody needs, he referred to a speech given by George Bush to the Israeli Parliament. In that bastard tongue known as English, the word “intelligence” can mean either mental capacity or military information (and a few other things, besides), so nobody had the slightest idea what Bush was talking about. If Bush stuck to proper Hebrew, which uses distinct words for brains and data, everything would have been clear—an argument unfairly presupposing both that our president makes sense generally, and that his audience was too dim-witted to understand words from their context. Regardless, the satellite-moon method of vocabulary invention creates precisely that kind of ambiguity; if you force words to mean two things, you get words that mean two things…so that, too, would be right out of the ideal version of Hebrew.
The only way to avoid both adopting foreign words and distorting the original meanings of Hebrew words is to ignore anything not found in the Talmud, to discuss only what the ancient Israelites discussed, to think only what the ancient Israelites thought, and to speak to no one who does not himself speak as the ancient Israelites did.
Which, I suspect, is the would-be linguist’s fondest wish, and the real purpose behind his suggestion.