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

[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!