Born to a Zoroastrian (or Parsee) family in India, Manekji Limji Hataria (1813-1890) dedicated most of his life to improving the circumstances of his coreligionists in both India and Iran, advocating for their civil rights and trying to ameliorate widespread poverty and illiteracy. But another cause close to his heart was the revival of the pre-Islamic Persian language—a language related to, but very different from, modern Farsi—in which ancient Zoroastrian religious texts, as well as an impressive literary corpus, are written. Hataria’s efforts roughly coincided with those of Eliezer Ben-Yehudah (1858-1922), who contributed more than anyone to the creation of modern Hebrew. Sara Molaie compares their efforts, and contrasts Ben-Yehudah’s success with Hataria’s ultimate failure:
Ben-Yehudah’s and Manekji’s language revival efforts had different goals, as well as different challenges. Manekji’s objective was to remove Arabic elements from the Persian language and to proliferate [knowledge of] ancient Persian literature. By contrast, Ben-Yehudah wished to create a vernacular version of Hebrew that would pave the way for Jewish nationalism, which required creating new words and importing new concepts into the language. Ben-Yehudah not only had to persuade people to speak Hebrew for non-religious purposes but also had to convince Jews to use words that had never existed before. . . .
[Manekji] called on Parsees to fulfill the mission of reviving ancient Iran and “the recovery of pre-Islamic literature,” but he did not lay emphasis on the oral practice of the language. The revival objectives of Persian literary associations were broad, highlighting the writing of pre-Islamic Persian rather than the speaking of it. [Furthermore], because of the lack of people with knowledge of the language, Manekji could not train students [at the network of schools he founded] in speaking or writing it.
By contrast, Ben-Yehudah was able to convince school administrators in Jerusalem to teach in modern Hebrew, and he trained two other teachers to continue the work in his absence. . . . Teaching in modern Hebrew increased the number of speakers and, more significantly, let the language enter homes and streets of Palestine. As these children grew up, they started to become fluent in Hebrew and shape their own Hebrew-speaking families.
Ben-Yehudah, unlike his conservative contemporaries, also realized that language can only thrive with dynamic usage. Adding words from a variety of non-biblical sources—despite opposition from rabbis and other members of the community in Jerusalem—was a crucial linguistic strategy that Ben-Yehudah employed successfully, while Manekji insisted inflexibly on the purification of contemporary Arabic-influenced Persian.
Read more on Stroum Center for Jewish Studies: https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/reviving-hebrew-persian-ancient-languages-eliezer-ben-yehuda-manekji-limji-hataria/