Eliezer ben Yehudah- Author of the Etymological Dictionary (Ency) of the Hebrew Language (8 vols)This is one of the greatest lexical works ever written. The OED (for English language and Lit), Petite Roget (for French Language and Literature), and Kluge's Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, preceded by Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm..... cannot do justice to the breath, scope, comprehensiveness, and creativity of Eliezer Ben Yehudah's multivolume history of Hebrew language which traces appearances of words and idioms across three millenia, not just centuries. Ben Yehudah also shows creativity as for instance when inventing new words such as (1) mekarer (refrigerator), (2) mekonit (car over the archaic option of the ancient term- merkavah (chariot), or (3) borrowings from other languages such as Italian [gelada] for ice cream. However what is breath taking in Ben Yehudah's work is its magesterial perspective to trace what in german is called the Zeitgeist (time spirit) of language across epochs, to reveal the destiny laddenness of the Holy Hebrew eternal language (Die Schicksal laddenkeit des Heilige Sprache). What results is a lexigraphic tour de force that allows scholars to study the growth, evolution, and development of the Hebrew language as if one were studying geological rock and fossil formations,or the rings of a tree, hardly static and dead, but a living language of Am Yisrael today resurrected from the sacred speech of Rabbis to describe holiness, to now mundane discourse such as how to buy vegetables in the Israeli Shukh! Photographs depict Ben Yehudah tirelessly as a labor of love in the Ecole Biblique with learned tomes piled high to the rafters, a scholarly project that ben Yehudah sacrificed for to bring to fruition for the benefit of all Humanity. While Ben Yehudah required his own immediate family to speak only modern Hebrew at a time in Palestine when French, English, and Arabic were the lingua franca, today we have an eternal debt to Ben Yehudah for the vision he possessed in making modern Hebrew the living language for Am Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael that had begun revitalization with Haskalic authors like Mapu who composed Romantic love novels in beautiful Biblical Hebrew. Ben Yehudah's etymological Encylopedia lets us see the development of biblical to mishnaic to geonic to the Hebrew of the Rishonim and beyond to the present day, an accomplishment the equivalent of a mental sunrise that expands all cognitive horizons revelaing language itself as a field of force, and Hebrew in particular as an eternal language which according to Sefer Yeitzirah was spoken by Adam and Eve in Gan Eden, a unique language allowing for the crystalizaiton of thoughts like no other language in the history of mankind (litgabeish ha-rayanot shelanu).
