Language oversight organizations

In 1890, Ben Yehuda founded the Language Committee. It fell apart soon after, though, and was not begun again until 1903 when it was restarted as the Language Council. Its goal was to:

• Collect words from Biblical, Talmudic, Medieval, and Market Hebrew and put together a dictionary.
• Coin new words where needed.
• Standardize pronunciation.

Ben Yehuda had already begun a dictionary before founding the committee. If fact, one of the first things Ben Yehuda did upon reaching Palestine was to put together a small phrase book to make it easier to function in Hebrew. He had added words to it as he went, until it had become quite large. The dictionary grew out of this project and in many ways it showed that origin. One of the stranger things about the organization of the dictionary was that it was arraigned first by topic and then in alphabetical order. This was supposed to make it more practical for the person who knew very little Hebrew. This dictionary was useful to Ben Yehuda in the production of his newspaper, but as it was not completed until near the end of the revival, most people did not get much use out of it during the most important years of the revival. It was useful, though, after the revival was mostly complete as a force for standardization.

One of the initial goals of the council was to reduce the misuse of Hebrew by the new learners. In 1911 they put out a pamphlet called ``Don't say ... , say ...'', identifying the ninety-eight most common mistakes people were making and telling people what they should be saying instead. As is often the case with proscriptive documents from language academies, this one was apparently ignored, as even though the pamphlet was widely distributed and reproduced, nearly all the forms were still in use in the 1970s. [1, p88]

The council would often get requests from people who needed terms for certain subjects, such as teachers who wanted to cover a subject in their class for which a large number of needed terms did not yet exist. The problem was, they were a committee and as such were very slow. They took ten years, from the time they were re-begun in 1903 until 1913, before they published the first of their word lists, consisting of terms for clothing, plants, kindergarten, and sewing. [1, p93] By the time they got their act together enough to decide on words and publish them, people had been using their own coined terms for years.

What the council did, surprisingly, was refocus themselves as arbiters. People who used the language for everyday matters found they needed words, and coined them as appropriate. There was some competition and natural standardization that happened to the terms, but there was also a huge amount of variation in terms. The council would look over the terms people had been using and choose the ``best'' one by a metric that took into account the source of the term,⁶ the amount of usage the term had, the ease of use of the term, and how well the term fit in with the rest of emerging Modern Hebrew. [3, p3] They then put the chosen terms in pamphlets they distributed to teachers and Ben Yehuda's paper, Ha-Zevi.

This model of language oversight was very effective at standardizing the language, but did not do well with preserving old forms. Some people felt that the role of a language council should be to purify and refine the language of the people into something more. These people usually also felt that it was dangerous to accept terms from these other sources as official or standard, as people might as a result misinterpret the Torah. [3, p3] When the language council had followed this policy people just ignored the committee. The oversight method, in which the committee worked primarily at standardizing among terms already in use, seems to be what they needed to do if they wanted to be paid attention to.

The council also worked at standardizing pronunciation. They had a long series of debates and discussions in which they decided on the Sephardic pronunciation for Modern Hebrew. The people had already decided on this pronunciation, though, as it was the pronunciation of the Market Hebrew pidgin, which Modern Hebrew was growing from. It is likely that if the council had chosen Ashkenazic Hebrew, they would just have been ignored. As it was, the decision of the council gave the people using the Sephardic pronunciation something to point at if asked why not to use the Ashkenazic one.