Academic literature on the topic 'Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, Hebrew language'

The new Hebrew culture which began to crystallize in the land of Israel from the end of the last century, is a successful event of “cultural planning”. During a relatively short period of time a little group of “cultural planners” succeeded in creating a system which in a significant way was adapted to the requested Zionist ideology. Eliezer Ben Yehudah immigrated to the land in 1881 and hitched his wagon to the hard work of the renewal of the spoken Hebrew language. The decision to establish Hebrew as a spoken language in the last two decades of the 19th century was not generally agreed upon nor accepted, even by central figures who participated in the creation of the new-old Hebrew language.

The study of the unprecedented revival of Hebrew in (pre-Israel) Palestine (approx. 1890–1914) has focused on the status of the language, because the revival has been rightly viewed as resulting from status planning. However, corpus planning, or codification, also served as a critical component of the Revival. Though Hebrew had been used for almost two millennia in written form, mainly as a language of religion, codification was needed in several areas — selection and harmonization of pronunciation, unification of spelling, etc. Still, the greatest task was adapting the language lexically to the modern world. Codification went on in Hebrew, in fact, for over a millennium by generations of writers and translators of various types of texts, culminating in the formation of a modern literature, probably the most instrumental factor enabling the Revival. Lexicalization in the Revival itself was partly done by the Hebrew Language Committee, but mostly by individuals. Ben-Yehuda drew words from old texts and created his own as a scholarly activity and to meet his lexical needs as a newspaper publisher and the first Hebrew dictionary compiler. Others included the writer and journalist Ben-Avi and the national poet Bialik, who drew words from earlier texts or created their own only when they needed them. Other individuals coined countless words to meet their communication needs — writers, journalists, educators, translators, publishers, editors, and language-conscious political leaders. Apart from drawing words from old texts with their original or new meanings, methods included: coining new words from old roots; using old, dormant words as different parts of speech; reducing expressions into single words; borrowing; loan translation; popular etymology; adding prefixes, suffixes or infixes to existing words; and merging pairs of words into single ones.

La présente recherche décrit la méthode de travail adoptée par Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922, ci-après Ben Yehuda) dans ses journaux d'information Ha-Tsvi (La Gazelle) et Ha-Or (La Lumière), tout en se concentrant sur les modes selon lesquels ses journaux ont traité les thèmes juifs. La recherche décrit la création par Ben Yehuda de la conscience nationale juive en Eretz Israël, depuis ses débuts (1881), processus qui recoupe largement les premières années du nationalisme hébraïque. Ce faisant, elle met en lumière la méthode de Ben Yehuda, basée sur l'identification de concepts, de récits et d'idées théologiques juifs et leur conversion aux besoins du nationalisme, tout en agissant au cœur de l'ordre culturel en place. Comme la théologie juive n'était pas la seule source du nationalisme juif, notre recherche marque les points d'interface entre la matière première théologique et d'autres idéologies ayant influencé Ben Yehuda, l'une des principales étant les Lumières européennes. Notre recherche se propose de repérer le système des éléments qui ont été dégagés du capital culturel théologique et les modes de leur présentation dans les journaux de Ben Yehuda, par rapport à leur source théologique et selon un ensemble de thèmes. Elle examine la façon dont a été organisé ce super-système jusqu'à devenir un capital culturel national, la manière dont il a été coordonné, à travers divers contextes, à d'autres systèmes, et quel rapport il entretenait avec son origine – le capital culturel juif<br>This study describes Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s (1858-1922) work method in his newspapers “HaTzvi” and “HaOr”, focusing on the ways in which these newspapers addressed Jewish issues. The study describes the construction of Jewish national consciousness in the land of Israel by Ben-Yehuda from the outset (1881), a process that, to a large extent, corresponds to the first years of Hebrew nationalism in the Land of Israel. The study delineates Ben-Yehuda’s method which is based on identifying Jewish theological concepts, narratives and ideas and adapting them for nationalist purposes, in what was perceived to be an undertaking conducted within the existing cultural order. Since Jewish theology was not the only wellspring of Jewish nationalism, this study identifies the interface between these theological sources and other ideologies that influenced Ben-Yehuda, among them one of the central influences, European enlightenment.The study seeks to map the network of elements derived from the theological cultural capital and the ways they were presented in Ben-Yehuda’s newspapers, in contrast to their theological origins, on a host of issues. It examines how this multi-system was consolidated into national cultural capital, how it was adapted through a network of contexts to other systems, and how it viewed its roots – Jewish cultural capital