# Modern Hebrew מִלּוֹן

69.6 s · v2 · Narrator: Frederick Surrey

For about seventeen centuries Hebrew was no one’s mother tongue. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda built new words from its own roots and marked his accepted coinages in his dictionary with a small sign. The tomato word he refused to print is the word Hebrew speakers use today.

| Time | Voice | Line | On screen |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 0:00.32 | Narrator | For about seventeen centuries, Hebrew was no one’s mother tongue. | The 1908 title page in ghost, with only מִלּוֹן in ink. A note gives the year the dictionary began to appear. |
| 0:04.50 | Narrator | Jews read and wrote it, but many modern things had only phrases for names. | Card 1: בתי עיניים, with the gloss “Eyeglasses were houses for the eyes.” |
| 0:09.42 | Narrator | Even a dictionary was called sefer milim, a copy of German Wörterbuch. | ספר מלים prints below. Wörter and buch rise under its two words, joined by hairlines. |
| 0:14.02 | Narrator | In 1880 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda wrote that such copies had made Hebrew almost German. | A rule strikes ספר מלים on “such copies.” A note names the weekly and the date. |
| 0:20.74 | Narrator | Instead he made milon from mila, which means word. | Card 2: מִלָּה plus the ending ־וֹן makes מִלּוֹן. |
| 0:24.48 | Narrator | The letter mem can mark a tool, so he put it before the root for sling and made makle’a, a cannon. | The composing card. מַפְתֵּחַ (key) is the model, the root letters ק ל ע drop into the pattern’s slots, and מַקְלֵעַ stands. |
| 0:31.28 | Narrator | In his own dictionary, this sign marks words he coined that people had already accepted. | The title page returns, then the key of signs. The coinage sign lifts off the page in rose. |
| 0:36.28 | Narrator | It stands before the bicycle, a word for two wheels modeled on the word for ears. | On p. 110 the sign lands before אָפְנַיִם. The card builds it from אוֹפָן (wheel) with the pair ending of אָזְנַיִם (ears). |
| 0:41.92 | Narrator | No one is sure what the prophet Ezekiel meant by khashmal. | The clause from Ezekiel 1:4 is set in Hebrew with its English. הַחַשְׁמַל is underlined. |
| 0:45.94 | Narrator | An ancient Greek translation gave it as elektron, so a poet used it for electricity. | ἤλεκτρον prints above the Hebrew. Cut to vol. 4, p. 1806, with “Elektrizität; électricité” isolated. |
| 0:51.24 | Narrator | Ben-Yehuda did not mark that word as his own. | The rose sign comes down toward the entry, finds a different printed sign there, and withdraws. |
| 0:55.02 | Narrator | Yehiel Michel Pines apparently named the tomato agvaniya, from a root that means desire. | עַגְבָנִיָּה with its root letters ע ג ב in ink and the rest in a lighter tone. |
| 1:00.22 | Narrator | Ben-Yehuda found the word immodest and kept it out of his dictionary. | His own word, בַּדּוּרָה, prints below. Crop marks close on the empty place where the sign would stand. |
| 1:04.16 | Narrator | Today Hebrew speakers call the tomato by the word he kept out. | בַּדּוּרָה sinks to ghost and עַגְבָנִיָּה stays in ink. |
| 1:08.00 | No voice | No voice. | The key of signs. The rose sign comes down and lands on its own row, and the film ends. |

Times are where each line starts in the final, read from the film's own audio.