Hebrew 102: using props
Sep. 12th, 2002 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioA co-worker gave me a shekel coin. She owed me a quarter, and this was novel enough that I took it as payment in full even though technically she owes me a couple pennies. I've never seen a shekel coin before, so I took a look at it.
I'm in that stage of vocabulary-building that's just a couple notches above "pathetic". But I look for casual learning opportunities. I figure that if there's enough context, I ought to be able to puzzle things out and maybe add a word or two to my vocabulary.
The first thing I noticed is that the front of the coin, below the "1", says (I assume) "shekel chadash". (Note: there are no vowels here, so I'm inferring based on the consonants. It's possible that the second word is something completely different; the word "chodesh" would use the same consonants, but that means "month" and that wouldn't make sense.) The word "chadash" means "new".[1] So if this is a new shekel, I wonder what it replaced. Yeah, duh: old shekels. But I mean, what was the change? Why are there new shekels and old shekels, and not just shekels?
The coin also has tri-lingual text around the edge. I see "Israel" (English), an Arabic squiggle (presumably a transliteration), and two words in Hebrew. The second word is "Israel". The first word is something of a mystery.
Near as I can tell (this text is really small), the letters are: het, taf, shin, nun (maybe gimel?), yud, tet. A noun would not be out of place here and the "ha" prefix means "the", so maybe this means something like "the state of Israel". (I know the word for "land", and this is not it.)
Unfortunately, that doesn't give me enough hints, and I can't make intelligent guesses at the vowels. So this is the point where I'll have to consult a dictionary for insight.
Oh well. I guess that wasn't a complete loss; I replaced some language curiosity with some currency-history curiosity. :-)
[1] If you've made it this far, you may wonder why the name of the new-year holiday does not contain the word "chadash". It instead contains "rosh", which literally means "head". So Rosh Hashana is literally "head [of] the year". (And yes, Hebrew infers prepositions a lot; the "of" isn't really there.)
I'm in that stage of vocabulary-building that's just a couple notches above "pathetic". But I look for casual learning opportunities. I figure that if there's enough context, I ought to be able to puzzle things out and maybe add a word or two to my vocabulary.
The first thing I noticed is that the front of the coin, below the "1", says (I assume) "shekel chadash". (Note: there are no vowels here, so I'm inferring based on the consonants. It's possible that the second word is something completely different; the word "chodesh" would use the same consonants, but that means "month" and that wouldn't make sense.) The word "chadash" means "new".[1] So if this is a new shekel, I wonder what it replaced. Yeah, duh: old shekels. But I mean, what was the change? Why are there new shekels and old shekels, and not just shekels?
The coin also has tri-lingual text around the edge. I see "Israel" (English), an Arabic squiggle (presumably a transliteration), and two words in Hebrew. The second word is "Israel". The first word is something of a mystery.
Near as I can tell (this text is really small), the letters are: het, taf, shin, nun (maybe gimel?), yud, tet. A noun would not be out of place here and the "ha" prefix means "the", so maybe this means something like "the state of Israel". (I know the word for "land", and this is not it.)
Unfortunately, that doesn't give me enough hints, and I can't make intelligent guesses at the vowels. So this is the point where I'll have to consult a dictionary for insight.
Oh well. I guess that wasn't a complete loss; I replaced some language curiosity with some currency-history curiosity. :-)
[1] If you've made it this far, you may wonder why the name of the new-year holiday does not contain the word "chadash". It instead contains "rosh", which literally means "head". So Rosh Hashana is literally "head [of] the year". (And yes, Hebrew infers prepositions a lot; the "of" isn't really there.)
Yay Google
Date: 2002-09-12 02:05 pm (UTC)The summary: In 1948, Eliezer Kaplan (first finance minister under Ben Gurion) instituted the Israeli Lira (IL) as a replacement for the Mandatory Government's currency, initially at an exchange rate of $4.
In 1980 during the 9th Knesset, following substantial inflation and devaluation (10 IL to one dollar US in 1977), the Israeli Lira was replaced with the Shekel (IS).
In September 1985, during the 11th Knesset, following additional inflation and devaluation, the New Shekel (NIS) was introduced at a rate of 1 NIS to 1000 IS.
Re: Yay Google
Date: 2002-09-12 02:13 pm (UTC)1 NIS to 1000 IS sure sounds like a lot of devaluation... And I don't know how the NIS compared to the dollar back when it was created, but I infer that it's dropped quite a bit since then.
Re: Yay Google
Date: 2002-09-12 02:42 pm (UTC)Re: Yay Google
Date: 2002-09-13 05:20 am (UTC)One interesting thing is that the initial designs for the 20 NIS notes were very similar to to the old shekel notes. (With the obvious subtraction of 3 zeros)
Also interesting (and logical) is that although there are 100 agurot to a shekel, in '97 nobody used the 1-agurot pieces. Almost all prices were rounded to the nearest 5...
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-12 03:11 pm (UTC)There are a bunch of enlaged images of Israeli coins at http://65.187.212.145/dan73.html
There's a particularly clear image identified as "1988-Israel-1 new shekel" at http://65.187.212.145/foreign/isr11.jpg
I was tricked! :-)
Date: 2002-09-12 06:20 pm (UTC)Thanks for the images!
As it turns out (after I failed to find anything useful in my dictionary), it's not a word. It's a date. The tip-off, had I been able to see it, was that the thing that looked like a yud to me is actually a quote mark, which is how abbreviations and acronyms are signalled. (For example, you may have seen people write b"h at the top of letters, which means "baruch Hu" -- yes, that Hu; it's the third-person masculine singular pronoun.) Dates are counted out using letters (there are no separate number characters) and are abbreviated in modern times (we just take the first 5000 years for granted if context tells you that 763 means 5763).
B"h
Date: 2002-09-13 05:28 am (UTC)O
Head of the Year
Date: 2002-09-13 06:22 am (UTC)an example: bayit is house, while bait midrash is house of learning - bait is the smichut form of bayit.
Re: Head of the Year
Date: 2002-09-13 06:28 am (UTC)So which of these is irregular, bayit or rosh? (The only other example that immediately comes to mind is "yom" (day), which also doesn't get transformed to say "day of [something]".) Does the s'michut form usually involve a transformation of the root word? And if so, can you tell me the rule?
Is the word s'michut related to the word s'micha, or is that just a coincidence or an artifact of transliteration?
Re: Head of the Year
Date: 2002-09-13 07:02 am (UTC)No idea if s'michut is related to s'micha, either.
I