However, as Hebrew caught hold of more and more Zionist Jews as a spoken language, it inevitably began to take on a life of its own-especially following the births of the first generations of Jews to speak Hebrew as a first language. The revival of Hebrew was initially a very conscious effort, led chiefly by master linguist and mad idealist Eliezer ben Yehuda. In fact, there are numerous cases of Hebrew speakers opting for an English word even when there is a good Hebrew word for something! Moreover, from 1917 until 1948, then-Palestine (what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories) was under British rule, making English a natural source to draw on in cases where Hebrew lacked a certain word or phrase. When Jews finally did begin reviving Hebrew in the late nineteenth century, there was a vast void of missing vocabulary needed to describe all the trappings of modernity. This is because Hebrew remained completely unspoken for almost two millennia, and thus did not evolve its lexicon naturally as other, continuously used languages did.
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