language stuff
Feb. 4th, 2006 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellio(Odd aside: inside the book is written, in pencil, "250". I couldn't parse that as a reasonable price, until it occurred to me that the book was published in Israel and might well have been bought there. 250 shekelim might have been a reasonable price. That's about $50-60 now; don't know what it was when the book was bought.)
I learned another chapter in the Hebrew book today. Sentences without verbs still feel weird -- mainly because everything is generally so explicit about tense/number/gender/etc, and then you end up with a case where you don't know if the implied verb is "is", "was", or "will be" (it'll be one of those) and you have to get it from context. Of course it's not the only language that does that.
In a lot of ways Hebrew is nicely put-together, grammatically speaking. I really appreciate that not only verbs but adjectives carry indicators of number and gender (and other stuff for verbs, of course). I can look at a verb and know that the subject is third-person masculine, which is handy if you're reading a conversation between a man and a woman and the subjects don't keep getting repeated. You don't need to: "he said" is all carried in the verb, so you don't need the "he" pronoun. And when adjectives can otherwise be ambiguous (is this about the great leader of the land or the leader of the great land?), this extra information can clarify.
The word order is different from English, though, so all attempts at translation involve either successive approximation or a large buffer. I'm not good enough yet to absorb an entire (significant) sentence and then spit out the English in one pass, so successive approximation it is. So I have this intermediate state of, say, "said (feminine singular) the woman (the) little (the) old to a boy..." before you get to "the little old woman said to the boy...". If I could actually think in the language that wouldn't matter at all, and I hope one day to get there. But that's presumably years away. I don't know how fluent you have to be to start thinking in a language; my only prior experience was in high school where two years of a foreign language (Spanish) was not enough to even think about thinking in it. But, y'know, high school... might be different for adults. And all things considered, I prefer the idea of getting the noun first and then its modifiers.
A previous chapter introduced some special-purpose words, including "yeish", which means "there is". Ok, so much for the earlier claim that imperfect tense is anything other than past tense; they were going to have to distinguish between present and future eventually, and I guess this is the toe in the door. ("Yeish" is not the imperfect form of "to be".) But I did a double-take when translating a passage (Gen 28:16) today, because what was literally coming out was "there is [God's name] in this place" and it feels weird to apply "there is" to a proper noun. This is usually given as "[God] is in this place"; literal translations are sometimes bad ideas, so that's fine. I guess I hadn't realized that present-tense active "to be" doesn't exist, only passive. Odd.
The book has exercises both for comprehension and generation. For people -- well, at least this person, but I think this is general -- reading is much easier than generating. For programming computers it's the other way around; generation is much easier than parsing. (I used to do that kind of programming.)
I also find reading and writing much easier than listening and speaking. I need to perceive how a word is put together, and that's harder in spoken form (homophones, poor articulation, etc). I wonder when that will get easier.
Aramaic, yeish
Date: 2006-02-05 05:12 am (UTC)There is Aramaic in tanach, especially in Daniel, Ezra, and Nechamya (E & N were one book but got split into 2 for length reasons). These deal with the Jews in exile in Babylon and then (some of them) returning to Israel, so it makes sense that they've got "local language".
The best translation I've got for "yeish" isn't really into English - it's the backwards capital E from math/logic. So "yeish li X" is "exists to-me X" -> "I have an X", and "yeish god in this place" -> "god exists in this place". On the other hand, this isn't a translation I've gotten from a teacher/class so much as the one I've come to from years of working with both languages, and I understand that most English speakers (and probably most people) wouldn't be comfortable with mathematical symbols in the middle of their sentences.
Also, "yeish" isn't really a present-tense passive form of "to be". It and "ein" ("there isn't/aren't" or slashed backwards E) aren't really verbs at all, as you can tell from the lack of gender & number markers: yeish li par, yeish li para, yeish li parim, yeish li parot (I have a bull, a cow, bulls, cows). I think they're classified as particles, but at the moment I can't recall any more description than that.
Re: Aramaic, yeish
Date: 2006-02-05 05:31 am (UTC)The best translation I've got for "yeish" isn't really into English - it's the backwards capital E from math/logic.
Oh thanks. That makes perfect sense. And I have no problem whatsoever with using mathematical concepts in natural languages.
I think they're classified as particles, but at the moment I can't recall any more description than that.
Thanks. The book (so far) has just given them as special words, not attributing parts of speech to them.
Re: Aramaic, yeish
Date: 2006-02-05 05:38 am (UTC)I'm no mathematician, but one of the reasons "yesh" never bothered me was that I'd already run into a similar issue with Russian. There's no verb for "to have" in Russian. There is something that means "to possess", but the connotations are quite different, so saying "I have" requires using phrasing that translates literally as "near me there is".
Re: Aramaic, yeish
Date: 2006-02-05 06:01 am (UTC)