Hebrew stuff
Sep. 27th, 2005 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI 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.
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.
don't be tense
Date: 2005-09-27 02:33 pm (UTC)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.