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.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 02:39 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-27 02:59 pm (UTC)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.