dictionaries and foreign languages

[cellio]

Last night I wanted to know the meaning of a Hebrew word (that I really ought to have known). When I ask Dani these kinds of questions he usually says "why don't you look it up in the dictionary?", so this time I went straight to the dictionary. Then I realized that the answer to his usual question is "because dictionaries only work if you know how to spell". The word I was looking up had four letters (that is, consonants), and three of them were ambiguous. (Hebrew has several pairs of letters that -- especially to foreigners -- are homophones.) Of the three ambiguous ones, my intuition was only correct for one of them. Oops.

Comments

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

See, now, if that's embarassing, then I feel horrible. Because that's my experience nearly every time I go near the Hebrew dictionary. I've pretty much given up in general, and I walk to the bookshelf, pick up the dictionary, hand it to Seth, and tell him what I want to look up. So anyway, don't be embarassed. After all, your intuition will never get any better if you don't keep trying. English, after all, is one of the least intuitve languages, and people learn it every day. ;)

[cellio]

I want to be a lot better with Hebrew than I am. And of course English has the same problems; if you're trying to learn the language then you really can't tell just by listening whether a word is spelled with a (hard) c or a k, for instance. Eventually you learn the language well enough to pick up the implicit rules, and then you can correctly spell words you don't know. I assume this will happen with Hebrew, too. (That is, I assume there *are* implicit rules for spelling.)

Dani did sort of defeat the purpose of his suggestion last night, though. I asked him whether "tikvah" is spelled with a tet or a taf, and he said "why don't you look under 'hope'?" Gee, thanks, I try to actually acquire the skill and you short-circuit it. :-)

(In case you're wondering, I had the kuf right and the vav wrong -- I thought it would be a vet. And I tried tet first for the first letter.)

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

well, since our synagogue is Tikvat Israel, I could have answered that one...but that would have been a first.

My Hebrew is, well, pathetic, but improving. And there are, apparently, rules, though I'm not actually convinced. But perhaps that will give you some hope.

Good luck!

[cellio]

Maybe someone who might be listening in (hi Yitz, hi Jeanne :-) ) can answer this if you can't:

Ok, given "tikvah" (hope) and your congregation "Tikvat Israel", what grammatical role does the "-at" tranformation fill? (What precisely does "Tikvat Israel" mean?) I assume it's prepositional, but "of" would be "l-" on the beginning of "Israel", not an alternate ending on "tikvah", right? (I don't actually know which would be the correct word, but it would be abbreviated down to "l" in any case.)

Now that I think about it, I've seen this transformation before. Our Shabbat-morning siddur is called "Shirat ha-Lev", obviously from "shira". But I think that's either "of" or "from" (song of/from the heart), and "from" doesn't seem to make sense for your congregation.

As you've probably figured out, I seem to learn language in large part from pattern-matching. I'm rules-driven. (I took one round of a conversational-Hebrew class and it drove me up the wall because the philosophy was "just try to talk and you'll figure it out", rather than "here's a typical conjugation".) And sometimes I stumble on something that seems to be a pattern but isn't, and it trips me up.

It just so happens...

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

that we covered this very question in my Hebrew class on Monday. Of course I don't recall the exact details, but it goes something like this. Tikvat Israel translates to something like "the Hope of Israel" I forgot why it's "-t" vs. "l-" but the funny thing is "Tikvat" is not a word by itself. It only gets it's meaning by the following noun. Of course that doesn't stop folks (incl. me) from referring to it as "Tikvat" for short, but I'm being a grammetical heathen by doing so! :-) I'll let you know if I remember the exact "-t" rule.

Re: It just so happens...

[cellio]

Thanks! If you find out what the rule is, I'd appreciate it if you'd pass it on. (As a meta-issue, if you can suggest a resource, other than a teacher, that would enable me to figure these things out on my own, that would be great too.)

It occurs to me that "l-" can be "for" in addition to "of" (e.g. kosher l'Pesach), so maybe it's really just that there are a bunch of Hebrew prepositions (whether words or word modifiers) and they aren't in a one-to-one relationship with the English ones. Hmm.

(I wish in retrospect that I had had any sort of formal study of grammar in college. I don't think I've been tested on parts of speech since 8th grade, let alone things like verb conjugations/declensions/etc. I know that English doesn't have all of this stuff, but I guess a "grammar theory" course would have been helpful along the way. If only I'd known!)

Re:

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

well, Jeanne beat me to it and answered better than I would have, so I'll just defer to her better judgement!