cellio | Hebrew: an "aha!" moment

In retrospect this sounds kind of stupid (as in "you mean you didn't already know that?"), but... this weekend I identified a mental block I've been having. It can be summed up thus: I inadvertantly expected the core parts of words to fall on the beat.

Consider the word beit-hei-mem-hei -- be-hei-mah (beast). The beit is the first letter of the word. You expect it to have some prominence. (I don't mean accent; Hebrew is usually accented on the final syllable.)

Hebrew doesn't necessarily use lots of little words; instead, things like prepositions and connectors just get pushed onto the beginnings of words. The word "and", for instance, never stands alone -- it's a vav prefix on whatever word it applies to.

So if you wanted to say "and a beast", you would have vav-beit-hei-mem-hei as one word. Note that I haven't transliterated it; I'll get back to this.

The vav that means "and" usually takes a sh'va (shwa, sort of an "uh" sound), but it might take other vowels for grammatical reasons or to avoid making something really hard to pronounce. And sometimes a vav is a vowel -- instead of getting "v'" or "va" you might get "u" (that's an "oo" sound), with the "v" part disappearing.

That was hard to explain, but that's actually not the breakthrough. That's just background.

Let's go back to our soon-to-be-conjoined beast. One more fact: sometimes a beit turns into a veit. Putting all this together, "and a beast" is pronounced "uv-hei-mah".

Now if I'm looking at this in the Hebrew I can see where the syllable breaks are; the vowels make that obvious. And I know that words get prefixes (and suffixes) all the time, so if you want to know what a word means you have to strip all that stuff off so you can get to the core. So I look at that and I focus on "hei-mah" -- hei-mem-hei -- because "uv" is obviously a prefix.

Bzzt.

I don't think I ever did this consciously, but subconscious cues can be powerful things. I can't think of an example of this sort of thing in English -- but, of course, we don't run to compound words to the same extent.

Now that I've recognized the problem I can be more mindful of it. In time I'll learn the complete list of possible prefixes (please tell me there is a finite list :-) ), and that'll help. I guess it just seems a little wacky that a critical letter is off hanging out at the end of a syllable instead of getting stress.

And this came up with written Hebrew. It might explain some of the problems I had in the conversational-Hebrew class, where I was hearing but (generally) not even seeing the words! (Though, that said, and at my rabbi's recommendation, I'm going to try conversational Hebrew again this fall.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

be-hei-mah gives us "behemoth."

I'm so used to smushing words together in German I bet I'd be great at Hebrew. I'll compoundword a lot of things in English that aren't supposed to be.

;)

be-hei-mah gives us "behemoth."

Yup. Which is plural. :-)

I don't know German, and have wondered whether it's similar to Hebrew in that respect.

I took one semester of German in college and didn't find it very similar. German allows stringing together of nouns (and verbs? maybe only gerunds) to form longer words. The possible combinations, even if you were to limit yourself to 2 words stuck together (which German doesn't) is infinite. Hebrew has a closed set of prefixes which, even with stacking, leads to a finite set of possible combined prefixes. Granted, these prefixes can then be attached to an infinite set of nouns, but the effect is very different from a translation point of view since there are a limited number of things that can be "peeled off" as prefixes.

The closest Hebrew has to German word-compounding is s'michut, which is theoretically infinite but in practice stops after a few iterations (usually 2-3) 'cause people's minds can only track so much at a time. For example: chatulat habayit = chatulah (cat) of the bayit (house), chatulat bayt monica = cat of the house of Monica, mitat chatulat bayt monica = mita (bed) of the cat of the house of Monica (i.e. the bed belonging to the cat of Monica's house) and by this point the speaker will have found a better/easier way to convey this idea. One important difference between this and German word-compounding is that in German the words join together and become one big word while in Hebrew the whitespace stays between the different words. Another difference is that in Hebrew some words (generally feminine singular and masculine plural) change form when they are in a s'michut construction (unless they're the last word - that one never changes) so you have a clue as to what's going on.

In alphabetical order (so I can try to make sure I don't skip any *g*):
bet (in/with/etc), hei (the), vav (and), kaf (as/like), lamed (to), mem (from), shin (that/which). [note: these translations of prepositions are very rough, but they are the best/most comprehensive I can think of off the top of my head.]

There are also some which show up as verb conjugation prefixes for future tenses (using modern Hebrew; biblical Hebrew uses the same prefixes but not always for the same meaning):
aleph (1st person singular), yud (3rd person, usually masculine), nun (1st person plural), tav (generally 2nd person but sometimes 3rd & feminine).

There's also lamed (infinitive), mem (binyan pi'el present tense), and nun (binyan nifal).

Hei can also be a prefix but then it's generally followed immediately by tav (binyan hitpa'el) before the root letters (if the first root letter is shin, sin, or samech then that letter will be in between the hei and the tav, and if the first root letter is tsadi then that letter will follow the hei and the tav gets replaced by a tet). [note: I think these are the only order-switching letters, but I may have missed one.]

There's also hei + vav as a prefix in binyan hufal (but you're unlikely to see that binyan much).

I think that's it but I may be forgetting a couple, especially in the verb conjugation category. Now you just have to deal with the fact that they can stack. *g*

Thanks!

Now you just have to deal with the fact that they can stack. *g*

Knowing that they can stack, and that beit is a prefix, is what led me to the "uv" mistake. :-)

By the way, when prefixes are piled up is there a canonical order? It appears to be "and", then prepositions, then "the" (when they're all relevant, I mean), but is that right? Going back to our conjugated beast, how would you add the definite article in? "U-ha-be-hei-mah" doesn't sound right; does the vav change vowels (to a sh'va, maybe) so you get v'ha-beheimah?

v'ha-beheimah sounds right to me. Btw, there's also a rule for when the v- "and" becomes u-. It only happens when the word starts with one of a few letters (I think the set is bet, kaf, mem, & pei, which are all labials...), so when the word is habeheimah the "and" is automatically v' instead of u.

Addendum/oops-alert: as I was writing the next paragraph I realized that there are 2 distinct kaf prefixes: the one I mentioned in a previous comment meaning "as/like" and one that means "when". This makes ordering a little more interesting.

The good news is that there is a canonical order and it's a lot like English: "and" is always first, then kaf ("when"), then shin ("that"), then the set of bet ("in/with/etc"), kaf ("as/like"), lamed ("to"), and mem ("from"), and "the" is last. So, for example, you get u'k'shebabayit ("and that when in the house" i.e. "when at home" or "when indoors"), which is a perfectly normal Hebrew word. [note: I'm using modern Hebrew syllabification here, which may or may not match biblical; if they don't match then the biblical syllabification will have less transparent morphological breaks.]

One odd thing to watch out for is that hei combines with bet and lamed (b' + ha = ba, l' + ha = la) but not with vav, "when" kaf, shin, or mem. I think it combines with "as/like" kaf, but I can't think of an example that sounds natural enough to be sure.

It can be summed up thus: I inadvertantly expected the core parts of words to fall on the beat.

If I understand what you wrote, that's actually likely to be correct if you're dealing with spoken modern Hebrew. A lot of people will make a syllable break between the non-verb-conjugation prefix(es) and the main word even if in "proper" Hebrew (e.g. biblical text) there wouldn't be one.

P.S. My apologies if I'm "talking too much" in your LJ. It's nice to have a non-stress-related conversation here (grammatical pun aside).

Fear not about "talking too much"! I'm enjoying your comments, and disk space is cheap. :-)

I know exactly what you're talking about, only I don't know enough Hebrew words to know when the prefix is really a prefix vs. part of the word. That's what makes being married to a fluent speaker a bonus! :-)

Hebrew: an "aha!" moment

And that's where we get...

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yes, the list is finite

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