Hebrew: an "aha!" moment

[cellio]

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.)

Comments

yes, the list is finite

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

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*

Re: yes, the list is finite

[cellio]

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. :-)

Re: yes, the list is finite

[cellio]

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?

Re: yes, the list is finite

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

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.