What is sensory language in literature?

What were the characteristics of the Hebrew language revival movement which got it to become so widely spoken in such a short period of time, and how much original scientific literature is currently present in the language?

• Also, how much technical education is currently imparted in Hebrew medium and what are the professional prospects for someone educated in this medium?

• Answer:

  I suppose that you are asking about the re-birth of Hebrew in the end of the nineteenth century. The short answer is: The people who were involved in it had a very strong motivation, and there were several social circumstances that quickly made the language popular. The circumstances are pretty much in consensus: Jews from different countries were coming to Palestine. They spoke different languages, but many of them had some knowledge of Hebrew from their families' religious background. They needed a common language to communicate, and Hebrew fit the bill. The most notable founders of the movement to revive Hebrew as a spoken language in Palestine were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissim_Behar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Klausner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahad_Ha%27am, Isaac Epstein and Yechiel Michal Pines. They were quick to understand the importance of educating children in Hebrew for the future of the language and the nation, so they started elementary schools for the children of the Jewish immigrants. By the early twentieth century there was already a generation of young people for whom the main language in which they spoke to their friends was Hebrew. In 1913, when the founders of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technion, the first technology institute in Palestine, decided that the medium of teaching there would be German, these young people protested and demanded it to be Hebrew, and they were successful. Many historians see this event, called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Languages, as the birth of the modern Israeli national consciousness (the country declared independence in 1948). Now about the motivation. What motivated Jews to come to Palestine at the first place? And why did they pick Hebrew? They could pick Yiddish, Russian, German, English, Turkish or Arabic - all of those languages had many advantages over Hebrew. There are several explanations to this, and I like the one by the Israeli researcher Binyamin Harshav. It's hard to call it completely scientific or comprehensive, but I'm not familiar with anything better. In summary, Harshav says that in the nineteenth century European Jews, quite like the European Christians, started losing interest in their religion, but still wanted to preserve their Jewish identity in some way and searched for another ideology. Many of them turned to Socialism. They tried to create socialist communities in Europe, but it was not a success, so they tried to do it in the ancient Jewish historical homeland - Palestine. They were so eager to revolutionize their lifestyle, that they tried to do everything in a revolutionary way, and they felt that speaking Hebrew was more revolutionary than speaking any other language. Again, this theory is definitely not comprehensive - it was written by a person who is more of a literature researcher than a historian or a sociologist, but that's the best one that I know. As for education: As I mentioned already, education in Hebrew was a very important value for early Zionists. Practically all Jewish schools in Palestine since the late nineteenth century were in Hebrew, and the situation is the same today. Some ultra-orthodox religious schools are in the Yiddish medium, but it's a rather marginal area of Israeli education. A small number of schools also offer English and French medium. Universities and colleges in Israel are also mostly in Hebrew. In a minority of courses the lecturer speaks in English, especially when all the literature about the subject is English or if the course is supposed to be attractive to foreign students who don't know Hebrew. Many educators and cultural activists criticize this quite heavily, because they - rightly - see it as a departure from the good old Zionist values upon which the country was founded. That's about the language spoken in the universities' classrooms; However, a very large number of the textbooks at the university level are available only in English, not to mention the academic articles that the students have to read. This forces all the students to learn English. Passing an English test is a condition to be accepted to all universities. Many of the research papers are written in English as well, because the assumption is that a paper written in Hebrew will be ignored outside of Israel. This is very common in exact sciences, though in humanities quite a lot - but far from all - of the textbooks and the papers and written in Hebrew. What are the professional prospects for somebody educated in Hebrew? In Israel - probably the best ones. There isn't much of a competition, because almost everybody is educated in Hebrew. Knowing English is an important advantage in many workplaces, but having been educated in an English-medium school doesn't add much, because Israeli children have many opportunities to learn English elsewhere (though not all of them use these opportunities well). Having been educated in an Arabic-medium school, where most Arab children go, may be a disadvantage, though the real requirement in most workplaces is to simply know Hebrew and it's very easy to see how well does a person know Hebrew by just exchanging a few phrases. Courses for improving Hebrew speaking and writing skills are quite popular among Arabs. I hope that this answers your question.