language stuff

[cellio]

I had one of those "you know you're in the SCA when..." moments recently, except it's not about the SCA. YKYitSCAW... you have a book written entirely in languages you don't read, but you don't care (usually because you bought it for the pictures/facsimiles). Well, my biblical concordance has content in Hebrew (duh), Aramaic (apparently), and Latin (title page and TOC, not guts), but not English. And no pictures this time. :-) And I don't care, because you use it to look up specific words (comprehension not strictly required here, just verb-conjugation skills) and the citations are comprehensible. I don't know what's up with the Aramaic, though; haven't investigated. (Is there Aramaic somewhere in the Tanakh?) It looks like there's nothing critical in the short (Hebrew) introduction that I need to get translated; even my pathetic Latin was enough to work out that the first four items in the TOC are the {fourth, third, second, original} prefaces to the book.

(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.

Comments

Re: brain cramp

[geekosaur]

Hm. I think most of the instances I've seen of that kind of thing use "hayah" or "yihyeh" as appropriate, but I'm still not so good at reading Tanach as opposed to various things in a siddur (hence mostly Mishnaic).