Hebrew 102: using props

[cellio]

A 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.)

Comments

Yay Google

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

So, I found a history of Israeli economics through 1992 or so at http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0aim0

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.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

(You can tell I've wrapped up the real work for the day and need to kill time).

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

Head of the Year

[magid.livejournal.com]

I believe that Rosh Hashana actually does sort of have the "of," in that the s'michut form (the one that says there's an "of" coming next) is the same as the usual form, so you get to figure out by context that the smichut is there.

an example: bayit is house, while bait midrash is house of learning - bait is the smichut form of bayit.