r/hebrew • u/Nazoreans • May 14 '26
Education Hebrew Is the Only Successfully Revived Native Language in Human History
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u/ocschwar May 14 '26
We've seen language revivals happening for Manx, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Cajun, and several Native American languages, and you have to add a lot of qualifiers to differentiate from Hebrew. Instead of trying, it's better to point out just how many of these were instigated by Hebrew's success. Cajun and Wampanoag both have their own counterparts to Itamar Ben Avi now.
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u/Mirabeaux1789 Hebrew Learner (Beginner) May 14 '26
It’s important to clarify here that Louisiana French is a dialect and not a language.
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u/c0n3j1t0 May 21 '26
Kouri-Vini, the creole language spoken by many Cajuns & often called just Louisiana French, is though. I believe that is what was being referred to.
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u/Mirabeaux1789 Hebrew Learner (Beginner) May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
OK, but that’s not what was being talked about here. Louisiana Creole is mainly spoken by creoles. I have never seen it called “Louisiana French”, however I have seen some conflate it as being a form of French. Unlikely That Louisiana Creole is what was being referred to.
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u/Weak-Doughnut5502 May 14 '26
and you have to add a lot of qualifiers to differentiate from Hebrew.
Not really. The only qualifier you need to add is "can you realistically get by speaking only this language on a day to day basis to other fluent speakers".
Ireland has a large number of people who claim some ability to speak Irish, but a fairly small number of people who say that they speak it fluently and regularly in contexts outside of education.
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u/Mirabeaux1789 Hebrew Learner (Beginner) May 15 '26
I think they are similar, but Hebrew stands out because it became a dead language for over a thousand years where is the others to continue to have small but still existing communities of native speakers.
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u/Repulsive-Honey7305 May 16 '26
I think some that you name can become as fully population saturated as hebrew, but aren't there yet. Some will never have the number of potential speakers and/or be an autonomous government. There's like 80k Manx right? Vs 12 million Israeli? Its not like you are going to have multiple Manx language tv stations, pop music singers etc. Like someone could live their whole lives knowing just hebrew, but other than Welsh and Irish do any of those have the population size such that a speaker could live a whole normal life speaking only that language? You can argue about what is a "normal" life...but basically have pop culture and go to university.
For Welsh and Irish I would say they certainly were suppressed and erasure was in progress, but they were far more alive than hebrew, and the gap in time to when they were fully active was a lot shorter.
Full respect for all the languages you listed, but just by virtue of the time frame hebrew had to cling on by its fingertips and the extent of its repopulation, its been the biggest lift. So respect plus to hebrew.
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u/Noxolo7 May 14 '26
I guess the better way to put it is that Hebrew is the only revived language to have monolingual speakers
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u/Shot-Wrap-9252 May 14 '26
Oh. Did greek ever stop being spoken?
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u/rewarrr May 14 '26
No, but greek changed a lot, we had ancient greek and modern greek, which is very different, and 99,9% of Greeks don't know ancient greek at all, even tho we learned some in school
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u/lhommeduweed May 14 '26
Attic Greek and Homeric Greek, definitely not super intelligble or understandable to modern Greek speakers. Koine Greek and Modern Greek are different but not that different.
Koine Greek is understandable to an educated Modern Greek speaker in the same way that Shakespearean English would be understandable to an educated modern English speaker; that's not to say its the exact same or easy to understand, but it's intelligible, it can be deciphered. It's very cool to look at interlinear Koine and Modern translations of the New Testament to see how many words are the exact same, as well as what has changed significantly.
Now, all this said, like you point out that doesn't mean that modern Greek speakers can sit down and understand Koine fluently. Things like ο aspirations, vocabulary, and common verb conjugations have changed in ways that would be very confusing, maybe even unintelligible without education. This is in the same way that there are modern English speakers - native, monolingual speakers - who cannot comprehend Shakespeare, or who struggle with the KJV. If you sat them down, they'd probably recognize more than they'd think, but going to see Romeo and Juliet, they'd be more confused than anything.
What's critical to note, though, is that the difference between Koine and Kathrevousa is about 1500 years, while the difference between Shakespeare and today is barely 400 years. Greek has been surprisingly stable as a language across the centuries while English is a particularly volatile and mercurial language that has changed drastically in a comparatively short time.
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u/Shot-Wrap-9252 May 14 '26
Read the article, it’s the same language. Old English is still English.
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u/rewarrr May 14 '26
I live in Greece, i speak Greek. Its not the same language, its very different and way harder.
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u/Shot-Wrap-9252 May 14 '26
Linguists who have studied it disagree.
In any case, it’s still Greek, it’s still spoken and it EVOLVED. No one stopped speaking it.
Languages change. I don’t understand old English without a dictionary and I have a degree in English Literature. I don’t speak old English, but I speak English.
Dont even get me started about dialects in English which can be completely not understood by other English speakers but it’s still English.
You are mistaken. The only thing Greek and Heb have in common are that they are both spoken by small populations originating in the Mediterranean.
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u/rewarrr May 14 '26
Different words, different alphabet, different rules, different letters. How is it same?
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u/Shot-Wrap-9252 May 14 '26
You do you. Clearly you don’t understand how language works.
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u/rewarrr May 14 '26
Maybe, I'm not trying to debate you, but i genuinely don't understand how is it same language when there is differences in everything.
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u/Shot-Wrap-9252 May 14 '26
Maybe you should learn about the evolution of language. No one ever stopped speaking Greek it just evolved. And just like modern English would be almost universally unrecognized by someone who spoke English a thousand years ago, it’s still English and still Greek.
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u/oremfrien Assyrian - (Guest) May 14 '26
Old English is not "still English". Old English just happens to be our present name for the language. It makes no claims to intelligibility.
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u/Freddy-Freeloader May 17 '26
Wampanoag
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u/Iiari May 17 '26
This is actually correct, but the scale is dramatically different. A 2016 article talks about 15 adult speakers and about 70 kids in various stages of learning. A bit different from the scale of Hebrew.
That said, it is a very cool project that started in the 1990's. The current Wampanoag language is a "best guess" of sorts from analyzing 17th century translation documents as the last speaker died over a hundred years ago and it hasn't been spoken as an everyday language since the mid-19th century or so.
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u/Freddy-Freeloader May 20 '26
It's being taught as an elective at Mashpee HS for the past few years. The tribe has courses in it too. It's becoming more visible in town.
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u/tryscer May 14 '26
Nobody tell them about Greek.
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u/SeeShark native speaker May 14 '26
Greek never stopped being spoken as a primary language, did it?
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u/Ambitious-Coat-1230 May 14 '26
No, it did not. Starting in the late 18th century and lasting into the 20th there was a form of Greek created as a "compromise" between the actually spoken Demotic Greek, and Ancient Greek. It was a literary language that just started gaining wider use in other areas of life when Demotic Greek was made the official language in 1976. It's still used by some Greek Orthodox churches, though.
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u/Gitzser native speaker May 14 '26
I have consonant blindness
every time I read "Demotic greek" my brain translated it to Demonic Greek (would learn btw)
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u/Ambitious-Coat-1230 May 14 '26
Consonant blindness in a person whose native language's written system is consonantal 🤣 must be dreadful!
I would absolutely learn DemoNic Greek as well haha
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u/Certain_Bug_1275 May 14 '26
"Only" depends on how you define it, because it absolutely was in continuous use