PARALLELS AND DIFFERENCES IN THE REVIVAL OF MODERN HEBREW AND MODERN STANDARD ARABIC ( 1 )

Speakers of both Hebrew and Arabic consider their respective language to mirror a unique history, often referring to it as a miracle. This claim to singularity is, on the whole, not unjustified. Hebrew is, so far, the only language that, after not being used as mother tongue for over one and a half millennial, has become again the native language of a whole nation, employed in writing and speech already in the third generation. Standard Literary Arabic, for its part, has not changed substantially, in its morphology and even in syntax, for about one and a half millennial. So exceptional was the history of both languages and so surprising their revival, that linguists, used to the accepted categories of historical development, sometimes failed to acknowledge these facts which did not fit their preconceived ideas. I shall content myself with quoting two rather striking examples. In 1912, Socrates Spiro Bey, in the introduction to his A New Practical Grammar of the Modern Arabic of Egypt, claimed :

«It is idle to say that nahwy or classical Arabic is a living tongue, for no Arabic speaking nation in any part of the world writes or speaks it... and there can be no hope of resuscitating it and giving it once more its place among living languages. History does not tell us of a single language which came into existence again after its death» .

Thus, more than one century after the renaissance of Modern Standard Literary Arabic, Spiro claims that no Arabic speaking nation even writes classical Arabic ! Even more amusing is Joshua Whatmough's contention (in his book Language, which was published as late as 1957) that :

«The experiment of teaching Hebrew in the schools in Israel... is contrary to the whole of linguistic history, and even to the present actual trend. It remains to be seen whether historic linguistic events are reversible, even on a small scale, any more than biological».

So as late as 1957, after generations of native Hebrew speakers have graduate from Hebrew schools, ranging from kindergaten to university, Whatmough was not able to accept the plain fact of the revival of Hebrew, only because it contravened his ideas of how languages develop. And, as I have been told by Hayyim Blanc, Whatmough did not ceased doubting the fact of the revival of Hebrew, till, at a linguistic congress, he happened to meet two Israeli scholars who were chattering on personal matters in Hebrew.

Yet despite the singularity of the history of Arabic and Hebrew (or perhaps because of it) it is imperative not to consider any of them isolated, but rather in the general framework of the adaptation of languages outside the sphere of western