1 For almost two thousand years, Hebrew was a language of prayer and study. Jews all over the world read the Bible and the Talmud in Hebrew, wrote letters and books in it, and prayed in it every day. But almost nobody spoke Hebrew at home. Children grew up speaking Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic or the language of the country where they lived.
2 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda wanted to change that. He was born in 1858 in a small town in Lithuania and studied in a religious school as a child, where he became fascinated by the Hebrew language. As a young man, he came to believe that if the Jewish people returned to their land, they would need one language to unite them. That language, he decided, had to be Hebrew.
3 In 1881, Ben-Yehuda moved to Jerusalem. He made a decision that surprised many people: from now on, his family would speak only Hebrew at home. When his son Ben-Zion was born the next year, he became the first child in modern times to grow up with Hebrew as his first language. It was not easy. There were no Hebrew words for many everyday things, and the family was sometimes lonely, because most people around them did not understand them.
4 To solve the problem of missing words, Ben-Yehuda started inventing them. Often he took an old Hebrew root and gave it a new form or a new meaning. When he could not find a fitting root in Hebrew, he sometimes looked for one in Aramaic or Arabic, languages that are close to Hebrew. Some of the words he created are used by millions of people today, like milon (dictionary) and glida (ice cream). He also started a Hebrew newspaper and began writing a huge dictionary of the Hebrew language, both old and new.
5 Many people were against his ideas. Some religious leaders believed that Hebrew was too holy to be used for everyday talk, and others thought that bringing an old language back to life was simply impossible. But slowly, more families began speaking Hebrew, and schools started teaching in Hebrew. In 1890, Ben-Yehuda and others founded the Hebrew Language Committee, which later became the Academy of the Hebrew Language.
6 Ben-Yehuda died in 1922, and his dictionary was completed many years after his death. He did not live to see the State of Israel, but his dream came true. Today, more than nine million people speak Hebrew, and it is the only language in history that went from almost no native speakers back to being the everyday language of a whole nation. Every time you ask for a glida, you are using a small piece of his dream.