In 1881, Lithuanian-born Jew Eliezer Ben-Yehuda emigrated to Palestine and realized that all the other immigrant Jews were speaking a bunch of foreign languages he couldn't understand, which made it really difficult to organize a bris. He figured that Jews should be speaking in a common, unifying language, and they actually had one available -- Hebrew -- but it hadn't been spoken as a native language since around the third century B.C.

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So Ben-Yehuda decided that his son, Ittamar, would have the privilege of being the first native Hebrew speaker in a few thousand years. It was going to be tricky -- Old Testament Hebrew didn't have words for things like steam trains, so Ben-Yehuda had to straight invent large portions of the language so that he'd be able to teach his son about anything that had happened since around the beginning of the Roman Empire. And yeah, that actually seems more awesome than bizarre, and when you consider that there's a guy in Minnesota who tried to teach his son Klingon, you'd think this kid got off lucky. However ...

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Where It Gets Weirder:

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When Ben-Yehuda said that his son was going to learn pure Hebrew, he really meant it. And since he and his dad were the only people who actually spoke Hebrew in conversation, Ittamar wasn't allowed to speak to or be spoken to by another human being, ever. When family friends came around to the house, Ittamar was sent to bed, lest he accidentally hear a non-Hebrew word and ruin everything.

When Ben-Yehuda caught his wife singing to the child in Russian, he flew into a rage and ended up breaking a table (we presume that during this incident the child learned the Hebrew phrase for "your mother is a lying whore"). Ben-Yehuda even forbade his son from listening to the noises made by animals, possibly because he figured that the local donkeys were all braying a donkey version of Palestinian Arabic in an effort to undermine all his work.

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But rather than treating Ben-Yehuda as a crazy person who feared animal language conspiracies, the Jewish community backed his efforts and began teaching Hebrew to their own kids, and today, Hebrew is an official language of Israel, although they probably also know what dogs and cats sound like.