Hebrew stuff

[cellio]

I can translate the first sentence of my next torah portion. Yay! Ok, it's not a long sentence. And it's from B'reishit, which seems easier to me. And I had to fill in one noun by inference -- but nouns are much more a matter of vocabulary while verbs are a matter of grammar, so that's fine.

Biblical Hebrew has two tenses, perfect (think "past tense") and imperfect (think "present and future tenses", and yeah, you get to figure out which by other cues). There is also a grammatical construct (vav conversive) by which a perfect verb is flipped to imperfect and vice-versa. I wonder why that exists. It's used a lot in the torah to transform imperfect to perfect (I haven't seen much going in the other direction). Hebrew has a perfectly-good (err) perfect tense; why write imperfect tense and then flip it so much? Or is there a difference of nuance between perfect and flipped-to-be-perfect?

I was listening to a Carlebach song recently called "Ivdu et Hashem b'simcha". In "ivdu" I recognize the noun "eved", which means "servant" or "slave", so I assume this is something about serving God with (b') joy (simcha). Now first off it's probably modern rather than biblical Hebrew, and second it's probably not past (or perfect) tense because that's not the kind of stuff Carlebach is likely to write songs about. So it's probably present tense or maybe a comamnd form. I only know perfect tense so far, and only one of the seven binyanim (err, that's too complicated for a parenthetical note), but "ivdu" seems to have the markers for third-person plural, which is about the last conjugation I would have expected here. Second-person plural (imperative or predictive) or any first-person would make sense here, but third-person, not so much. I guess eventually I'll learn other tenses and other binyanim and all will become clear.

Comments

"Ivdu et Hashem b'simcha"

[magid.livejournal.com]

There's a reason it's in the plural: it's a quote from Tehillim (http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/tan/psa100.htm) (Psalms, 100 verse 2), where it's talking about the nation.

Re: "Ivdu et Hashem b'simcha"

[cellio]

Thanks for the reference. The translation casts it as second-person imperative, though I guess third-person ("they will serve") would have been plausible too. So here I've convinced myself that third-person wouldn't be weird, only to find that it's second! Oops.

Re: "Ivdu et Hashem b'simcha"

[sethg]

I checked: "they (m.) will serve" is "ya`avdu". "`ivdu" is only used as a plural imperative.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

One of my confusions is that vav conversive looks EXACTLY like vav conjoinive -- the "and vav".

don't be tense

[sethg]

Perfect and imperfect are really aspects, not tenses. The perfect aspect means "completed action" and the imperfect aspect means "incomplete action". Usually, anything in the perfect aspect is implicitly in the past tense, but not always: the most obvious counterexample I can think of is the kabbalat-Shabbat psalm that begins "Hashem malakh"--which in that context does not mean "God used to be King", but something like "God will finish becoming King".

Modern grammarians sometimes call the reversing vav the "vav consecutive" rather than the "vav conversive", because it's only used in narrating a sequence of events ("this happened, and then that happened, and then that happened").

I'm pretty sure "ivdu" is plural imperative. I'm not sure the third-person plural would have a chirik under the ayin--I'd have to look it up.

There's a wonderful book called Luach Po`alim ha-Shaleym which has exhaustive tables for every verb conjugation in every binyan, and an index mapping three-letter roots onto table rows. This book is especially helpful when you're trying to figure out whether the root of some word you're trying to translate has a vav in the middle, or a yod in the middle, or a hey on the end, etc. There are extra tables in the back showing how the vowels change when you put a vav-conversive on the front, and when you put an object-pronoun suffix on the end.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Didn't you post a link to an article that mentions the biblical use of vav a while ago? IIRC, they said it didn't flip perfect/imperfect, it flipped past/future. So, imperfect = "he does/will do", vav-imperfect = "he did/was doing (and still is doing)"; perfect = "he did" vav-perfect = "he will have done/he did and the consequences are relevant now", no?

Admittedly I'm guessing wildly based on Japanese, where the main division is also perfect/imperfect rather than past/present. It always makes me do a double-take when I see a perfect-tense sentence that's clearly not in the past. The imperfect past sentences are more common--one of the things they try to drill into your head is not to use the perfect tense for conditions that still persist, even if we'd use the past tense for it in English.

[cellio]

I think the link was from someone else, in comments. I'll have to go back and look for it.

It's possible that I'm just confused. I first learned about vav conversive in a class where the instructor said "future" and "past", but he probably wouldn't have said "perfect" and "imperfect" in front of that group of students anyway. The biblica-Hebrew book I'm working through asserted early on that there's really just "perfect" and "imperfect", so I mapped the vav-conversive stuff onto that. But maybe I shouldn't have.