"A seed blessed by the Lord": the role of religious references in the creation of Modern Hebrew

• Autores: Iair G. Or
• Localización: Language policy, ISSN 1568-4555, Vol. 15, Nº. 2, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Language policy and the reconceptualization of religions as and in institutions), págs. 163-178
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The nativization of Modern Hebrew at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth is one of the most commonly cited examples of language planning and (possibly) revival. The Hebrew Language Committee, which was the main body responsible for Hebrew language planning in the formative years 1890–1953, held numerous discussions about the desired pronunciation, grammar, orthography and lexicon of the evolving language. The present study looks into one intriguing trait in the discourse of the Committee: the inclusion of numerous religious expressions drawn from Jewish religion, mysticism, and law. The paper examines these religious references and attempts to discover whether the Hebrew planning discussions included in the Committee’s Proceedings were a continuation of Jewish scholarly, halakhic deliberations, or whether the use of Jewish imagery and allusions was just a façon de parler. Using a language ideologies framework (Blommaert in Language ideological debates. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–38, 1999; Irvine and Gal in Regimes of language: ideologies, politics, and identities. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, pp 35–83, 2000; Woolard in Language ideologies: practice and theory. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, pp 3–47, 1998), it suggests that while the overt intentions of Hebrew language planners were most predominantly secular, there is enough evidence to support the claim that the language planning of Hebrew was not fully secularized.