He-brew

My project on type design has begun,  today my job was to look into how the Hebrew language and script was revived in the last century. Revival of Hebrew language took place in Europe and Israel in the end of the 19th and in the 20th century. 

If we speak chronologically the entire Hebrew language timeline can be divided into four categories, 

1. Biblical Hebrew: Hebrew was used in the synagogues. Aramaic was commonly used.
2. Mishnaic Hebrew: Rabbinic Hebrew, Talmud and Midrosh around 2nd century AD.
3. Medieval Hebrew: used to translate Arabic works into Hebrew.
4. Modern Hebrew: rebirth of Hebrew as a spoken language under Eliezar-Ben-Yehuda.
   

Here I will mostly write about the Modern Hebrew and Eliezar-Ben-Yehuda. 

Eliezar-Ben-Yehuda was is the man who is credited to for single handedly reviving the modern hebrew language. Born in 1858 in a small village in Lithuania. He began learning Hebrew at a very tender age. As he excelled in his studies, He was sent to Talmudi Academy  in a hope of becoming a Rabbi... More on him can be read from www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

 The reason why he is famous, is because He formulated several theories to popularize the hebrew Language out of all those Three are important:

• Hebrew in Home

Ben-Yehuda after immigration to Palestine decided to only speak in Hebrew. When his first son was born he made sure to that the child only learned the Hebrew language and nothing else hence making the child as the first of all-hebrew speaking child in modern history.

• Hebrew in school

He also proposed that rabbis and teachers should use hebrew as the language of instruction in the jewish schools in palestine. Revival could succeed especially and perhaps only if the younger generation could speak hebrew fluently. Apart from imparting education to children he also made sure to increase hebrew literacy  among adults by publishing low cost hebrew newspapers.

• words,words,words 

As the spoken form hebrew was lost for 16 centuries till it was revived again, a lot new words had to be formulated. Initially to increase the vocabulary in hebrew he coined a few word on his own and let others also do so. In 1890 he formed the Hebrew Language Council to channelize the the process.

To draw a parallel with the Ol Chikki script and it's language Santhali. The population of Santhali people is about 50 million out of which only 10-30% of population knows how to write in Santhali. Due to it's similarity with bengali many writers are comfortable in writing it in bengali, also during the british rule the language was romanized and was thus also written in latin script. There are similar ways through which the written form of the language can be popularized only this time the context is different. right now for propagation of the script a few things that I could come up with are:-

• doing a small publication on the folk tales of the santhals (from suresh).
  
• adding Ol Chikki subtitles to the ever popular films.( from Ranjan)
• Local channels can start Ol Chikki language programs or at least news. 
• santhali newspapers.