Hebrew never stopped being written. For centuries it carried contracts and poems and letters between communities that shared no other living tongue — a man in Salonica could write to a man in Vilna and be read. What it had largely stopped doing was small talk. So when Ben-Yehuda and a few friends sat down in Jerusalem in 1881 and held what's remembered as the first conversation in the modern spoken language, the difficulty wasn't the grammar, and it wasn't the vocabulary for law or prayer. It was lunch. Towel. Doll.

Some of the words got made and stuck. Milon, a dictionary, off the word for word. Iton, a newspaper, off the word for time. Ofanayim, a bicycle, in the dual, because a wheel is an ofan and you need two. Glida for ice cream, pulled out of the Aramaic for frost. And some didn't: he wanted badura for the tomato, borrowed straight from the Arabic, and the one that won was agvaniya, built by Yehiel Michel Pines out of a root to do with love, after the old European habit of calling the thing a love-apple. Markets decide these things, not committees.

He spent the rest of his life on the dictionary and didn't finish it; volumes kept appearing for years after he died in 1922. His son, born the following year, is usually called the first child since antiquity to grow up hearing nothing else at home. I've a battered Hebrew-English pocket dictionary on the counter with a child's pencil down the margins, which is the only sort of proof a bookseller ever really gets.