Extra Credit: Sacred Language, Spoken Language

Nurit Aviv's film Sacred Language, Spoken Language interviews a handful of Hebrew speakers, writers, and poets on their views of this revived language. As Etgar Keret put it, "the history of Hebrew is unusual," as it was once "frozen for two thousand years, then defrosted." This "defrosting" was brought upon by the Zionist movement, which supported the reestablishment of Jewish people in Palestine, thus leading to the rebirth of their ancient language. According to the first speaker (Haim Gouri), the Hebrew language was the foundation of the national revival--"Without the language, no rebirth of people." From a linguistic standpoint, this statement is quite significant. It shows the importance of language not only as a means to communication, but also as something that holds a culture together.

As a consequence of the language being dead for so long, words had to be taken from different languages (borrowing) and new slang had to be invented in order to be better suit the current world. While this modernization was essential to the revival and maintenance of Hebrew, it took some of the ancient cultural significance out of the language. Some of the people being interviewed in this film even referred to these new Hebrew translations as "soiled" and "profane". Many of the people also noted that the Hebrew they know today is comprised of two layers: the scriptural and daily, the sacred and profane, the paternal and maternal. The former descriptions in each pair are the ancient language, seen in the Bible and Tehmad. The latter describes the language spoken and known by all Hebrew speakers today. Therefore, while modernization was inevitable, some of the ancient Hebrew spoken long ago was preserved.

As a linguistics student, I found this film quite interesting. For a language to have been dead for so long, its people had to work extremely hard to reconstruct and revitalize it. It was fascinating to listen to a wide range of peoples' views on the Zionist movement. I found Ronit Matalon's interview particularly interesting. As a writer, she must understand the two layers of Hebrew, then must utilize both the ancient and modern forms in her writing. She concludes her time by saying, "It's the right, the responsibility, the freedom to use the language you want to use. You are not judging the words, the sentences, the expressions you use by their origins but by the way they sound, how they're used, what they mean." In other words, people choose to speak a certain way not because of the history behind that certain dialect, but because it conveys a certain message or emotion that they want to get across. From a linguistics view, this sums up perfectly the use of language.