quoting --- Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died

quoting --- Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died and were reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should we question the wisdom of that choice? But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the language was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no longer the principal language of the Jewish people. During this time, it remained an object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And there are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that language death is reversible. --- I think the author's statement is problematic in that it implies that hebrew was only if interest to people studying it. But that's not true. Hebrew was the foundational language for internal discussions of judaism's legal system, which was alive and evolving. while it might have not been the day to day vernacular that people spoke it, the vast majority of religious legal texts were written in it over those years (or to rephrase it, the legal texts that survived, which would reinforce the value that being written in hebrew had over the "native" tongue). i.e. it was in constant use, just not for normal conversation.