some progress (Hebrew)

[cellio]

I'm reading torah in a couple weeks, so last week I started looking at the portion I'm doing. I was able to translate most of it without aid. That was a pleasant surprise (though it's also not a hard passage). There were a few verbs I didn't know (like "strip"), for which I do not feel in the least bad.

I noticed an unusual construction in this portion (Chukat, chamishi), and I wonder what it means. (I haven't gone looking for commentaries yet.) Generally in biblical Hebrew double-noun constructions (which probably have a formal grammatical name) are "noun [implied "of"] noun", like "b'nei Yisrael" = "children of Israel". Har Sinai (har = mountain) is where we received torah. The beit t'filah is the house (beit) of prayer (t'filah). And so on. So I was a little surprised to see the phrase "hor ha-har" (= Mount Hor, but literally Hor the mountain) used consistently in this passage. "Har Hor" might sound a little funny, but is it grammatically unsound in some way I don't understand? Is this kind of stylistic variation really all over the place but I'm only now noticing it?

Comments

[juuro.livejournal.com]

At least in modern colloquial Hebrew the construction "hor ha-har" would be used when there is danger of confusion between several places each called hor; something like "hor ha-nachal" versus "hor ha-har". Functionally, of course, the regular structure conveys the same information, but perhaps this inversion is used for emphasis.

I don't really know Hebrew; just small snippets of the language have stuck.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

I googled "hor ha-har" just to see. Most of the hits indicate that the mountain has some kind of double peak and has been called "The mount(ain) on top of the mountain." I can't tell if the name preceeded the description or vice versa.

The visual depicted of Aaron's death and burial seems particularly poetic to me, lending creedence to "Har Hor" sounding funny and also not seeming mythically powerful. Not "majestic" if you can pardon the pun.

[magid.livejournal.com]

biblical Hebrew double-noun constructions (which probably have a formal grammatical name)
Smichut is the name of the construction when it's two nouns, the first of which is slightly altered to show the possessive. Not implied "of", actual "of". Otherwise it would be "banim Yisrael" rather than "b'nei Yisrael," for instance.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

the first of which is slightly altered to show the possessive.

Most singular feminine and plural masculine nouns change their endings, but most singular masculine and plural feminine do not.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

One of the few things I recall of Hebrew grammar is that, in English, this preposition-less Hebrew possessive is called the "construct state". It looks very like a phenomenon that is quite common, perhaps characteristically so, in English: the appositive. That's where we say things like "space shuttle escape hatch release mechanism repair kit manual", where we string nouns together, all of which except the last are actually functioning as adjectives. Latin also has a similar construction, called the appositional genitive.