Why is Ivrit not considered an artificial language?

Question

Why is Ivrit, the modern version of Hebrew, not considered an artificial language like for example Interlingua? From the history it looks like the language was dead except in clerical circles and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda "revived" it.

Now, I'm only just beginning to learn the language but I was wondering why it isn't considered artificial as such, because from what I read a lot of the things virtually not present in at least two millennia have been given words that were literally invented.

In Interlingua and Esperanto a lot of words are also rooted in Romance languages, yet they are considered artificial and Ivrit is apparently not. Why?

Answer 1

While this is a fair question, I think there are several factors which argue against Modern Hebrew being considered an artificial language:

• The degree of mutual intelligibility between the modern language and the ancient language tends to argue that these two are in fact the same language.
• The fact that the language, as "constructed", was specifically designed upon the existing language so that it would act as a faithful representation of the ancient language in the modern world. If a word was needed for which the Ancient Hebrew word was not known, great care was taken to scour literature for the word or to incorporate a word that was at least potentially an Ancient Hebrew word using related languages.
• The language is not spoken strictly as "designed", with many words and phrases deviating from the original intent. We can then, at least when feeling pedantic, claim that even if Modern Hebrew were a constructed language, that what is currently spoken in Israel is no longer artificial.

Now, this certainly isn't "proof", and I do not think this may not be the kind of issue that can be settled because everyone will have their own definition of the word "artificial". For example, someone could come along and claim that there is no such thing as an artificial language, or that one language could never be more artificial than another. (Stranger conversations have taken place)

Answer 2

I know practically nothing about Hebrew. My answer is based on your claim, "a lot of the things virtually not present in at least two millennia have been given words that were literally invented".

There are two classes of words, open class and closed class.

Open classes accept the addition of new morphemes (words), through such processes as compounding, derivation, inflection, coining, and borrowing. A closed class is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items. Typical closed classes found in many languages are adpositions (prepositions and postpositions), determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.

This applies to any language. People can create new nouns and verbs, when necessary or when convenient. For example, recent additions, to English, of verb forms of google and tweet, do not make English any less natural for it. Now, if some committee modifies Hebrew grammar significantly, I'd say there is good reason to start classifying the modified Hebrew as a constructed language, as opposed to natural language.

Answer 3

I know this question is old, and this is unlikely to be read by the OP, but a significant factor is that, whilst Hebrew was not anyone's day-to-day language, it was far from dead outside clerical circles. Any observant Jew would have a passing familiarity with the language (even if their vocabulary was a little skewed) as Jewish worships requires the reading and recitation of various passages and prayers in Hebrew. Likewise, whilst Ashkenazim usually used Yiddish when talking to each other (even when writing to people a long distance away), and Sephardim/Mizrahim tended to use Ladino and/or Judaeo-Arabic, when communicating between different groups of the diaspora (i.e. an Ashkenazi writing to a Sephardi), Hebrew would be the only shared language and was definitely used for such prior to ben Yehuda's revitalisation efforts began

So the premise of the question is false. Hebrew was not dead outside clerical circles but neither was it fully alive. To my knowledge there is no other language that has experienced a properly analogous circumstance