cellio | divine grammar

I've been slowly working my way through The First Hebrew Primer, which covers biblical (not modern) Hebrew. The book came recommended by several people. Dani, after flipping through it, said it seems like the perfect book for me except that they sometimes avoid using the real technical terms and he thinks that might bug me. We'll see.

So far, the book does seem to be pretty good. The examples are contrived; yes, you want to start with a small vocabulary, and I can tell that they've carefully chosen some words that could be confusing (to teach valuable lessons early), but I'm looking forward to the day when I can read sentences that are an improvement on, say, "a nation crossed over from Moav and it crossed over the mountains with animals and servants to the land and it guarded the city". Can you tell that so far we're just doing past-tense perfect verbs? (They have not named a binyan. I assume qal. I think that's one of those "real technical terms" that they might have a tendency to omit.) But hey, I can actually read and translate straightforward past-perfect sentences with a restricted vocabulary. :-)

I've noticed something odd. But I have to set it up.

Consider the following assertions:

1. Nouns are indefinite by default. "Melech" is "a king". To make a noun definite, you prefix with "ha-". (Ok, sometimes the vowel can mutate. We're not going there now.)

2. Proper nouns are, of course, definite by default. You wouldn't say ha-David ("the David").

3. In English prepositions are stand-alone words, but in Hebrew they usually pile onto the noun as prefixes. "L'melech" is "to a king" or "for a king". (Most of the prefixes have multiple meanings, and you just have to work it out from context.)

4. However, if you want to combine certain prepositions (in/on, to/for, as; not sure of others) with a definite article, you don't stack them. "To the king" is not "l'ha-melech" or "ha-l'melech". Instead, the "h" (hei) drops out and its vowel moves to the "l" (lamed). So "to the king" is "la-melech".

Ok, I absorbed all that and then said "hey wait a minute...". There is a construct I've seen a lot in biblical Hebrew. I checked a couple places in the bible just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. Nope -- we really do see "la-[God]" in several places. Not "l'[God]". (Well, sometimes that too, but not always.)

Remember 2. Proper nouns don't get a "ha-". The "la-" mutation doesn't mean something else (according to Dani).

Conclusion: God gets his own rules of grammar.

I guess he can if he wants to. It's his language, after all. :-)

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I used the first edition of that book when I began to learn Hebrew. It was a tremendous help, and I still feel very close to the book of Ruth, which was the text they used.

And to quote

chaos_wrangler, prepositions are weird and make no sense anyway. That is, they rarely translate well from language to language.

Prepositions are weird, yes. But correctly recognizing them is essential to parsing. :-)

Can you say which word for G-d it is that gets "la-", or is it all of 'em? I mean, some of them aren't "names" so much as they are "descriptions", right? "Elohim" and "Adonai" come to mind here. "ha-Elohim" makes some degree of sense, and therefore "la-Elohim" doesn't strike me as unusual.

> his language, after all. :-)

These days I tend to think his language is Avestan, but that's me and my weird religion these days. ;)

Sorry, I should have been clearer -- I'm talking about the four-letter actual name of God here.

These days I tend to think his language is Avestan, but that's me and my weird religion these days. ;)

That was a possessive "his", not an exclusive one. :-)

I think the problem is that we're often not really substituting "Adonai" (literally "Lord"), but "the Lord" ("ha-Adonai"). Consider how it gets translated to English (outside of Reform which avoids the "gendered" term "Lord").

True, but that is a substitution, not what the Hebrew literally says. That's why I'm confused by the Hebrew grammar. If the text said "lord" this would make sense, but the text uses a name for which we read "lord".

Though I suppose, all that said, the vowels aren't original so it might be that the Masorites who did the vowel-pointing were trying to signal that substitution. Hmm, I wonder if that makes sense. I don't know much about the processes they followed.

Consider that the Masoretes vowelized the Tetragrammaton as if it were "Adonai", except when it follows "Elohim"; in which case "Elohim" is vowelized as "Adonai" and the Tetragrammaton is vowelized as "Elohim". Seems likely they would indeed have done that.

I think the case geekosaur (http://www.livejournal.com/users/geekosaur/) is referring to is when the Tetragrammaton follows the word adonai. In that case using the standard pronunciation for the Tetragrammaton would make the phrase sound like the same word said twice in a row, so "adonai" gets read as written and the Tetragrammaton gets read as "elohim". (There are lots of instances of this in Yechezkel.)

4. However, if you want to combine certain prepositions (in/on, to/for, as; not sure of others) with a definite article, you don't stack them. "To the king" is not "l'ha-melech" or "ha-l'melech". Instead, the "h" (hei) drops out and its vowel moves to the "l" (lamed). So "to the king" is "la-melech".

One exception (noticed while I was going through my concordance for evidence re geekosaur's point): ha- can also be used as a question prefix, so you can get things like hal'adam yesh enayim "[query]-to-man exists eyes" or "does a man have eyes" (granted that's a weird sentence but you get the point).

(There are lots of instances of this in Yechezkel.)

Thanks for the heads-up. I haven't seen this in the torah portions I've read so far, but if it comes up at least I'll have a clue now. :-)

ha- can also be used as a question prefix

Wacky. Thanks!

I've been studying Modern hebrew for 3 or so months now and I find that more and more I'm able to understand Biblical Hebrew. If you're ever interested, try to find an old Grammar book called "Fundamentals of Hebrew Grammar"/"יסודות הדקדוק העברי" by two authors named Wallenrod and Aaroni . It was published in 1949, but maybe you can find a newer version of it. It's helped me immensely due to the extensive coverage in it. It's pretty technical in terms of the grammar rule elucidation and titling. Breaks everything down by שיער so that you can tackle one concept at a time.

- Inkhorn
http://intellectualization.blogspot.com

Thanks for the recommendation! Sounds like a useful book.

divine grammar

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Grammatical/Syntactical Overlap?

Re: Grammatical/Syntactical Overlap?