How English Words Get Entrenched in Israeli Speech, and How to Get Them Out

“What Is ‘Hashtag’ in Ancient Hebrew?” asks the title of a July 30 article by Isabel Kershner, the Israel correspondent of the New York Times. “Although Israelis,” she writes,

pride themselves on the revival of ancient Hebrew, . . . this high-tech nation can find itself at a loss for contemporary terms. The venerated Academy of the Hebrew Language is always working to update [Hebrew’s] vocabulary. . . . Among the academy’s latest crop, announced on Twitter this month, were Hebrew words for shaming (biyush, an outgrowth of an existing verb, to shame), hashtag (tag hakbatzah—literally, group tag), and big data (n’tunei atek).

Of course, there could no more be a word for hashtag in “ancient Hebrew” than there could be a word for smartphone in ancient Greek, but let’s not nitpick the title given to Kershner’s article by her editors. Rather, let’s talk about the fate of the many thousands of neologisms like biyush, tag hakbatzah, and n’tunei atek that the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an official government body established in 1953, has come up with over the years.