Of course, you can't go to Israel without at least trying to learn Hebrew!
So I went to my local library, which just happens to specialize in language resources, and checked out a basic audio course. It's a good excuse to get out and go to the park. I sit on a bench and practice writing out sentences like “Hello, how are you?” “What is that?” and “That is an apricot.”
Learning Hebrew, for a Westerner like me, is just like learning a modern piece on the harp: at first it makes absolutely no sense, so you just have to memorize by rote for a while until you build up a framework for understanding how things are put together. I feel like I'm a little kid again – making up codes to send secret messages, writing everything backwards for good measure! Except it's more than just learning the alefbet. Everything that we English and Romance-language speakers thought we knew about language is different for Hebrew. Here's some of the curious things I've discovered about Hebrew so far:
Vowels are dots, like morse code, sprinkled around the consonants. But since it's tedious to write all of those dots all of the time (and really frustrating if you're using a pencil or a ball-point pen, because you can't just tap the paper, you really have to grind away at each one to get it to show up), most of the time the vowels are just left off!
There is no indefinite article (a/an). It just doesn't exist.
There is also no “to be” in present tense. Literally: “What that?” “That apricot.”
Verbs are conjugated not just in function of person (I, you, he/she) and number (singular or plural) but also depending on whether you are a man or a woman!! Aaaaa!!
To indicate possession, you add an ending to the word that is being possessed. The ending changes with the gender of the possessor. Thus, in order to ask how someone is, since the idiomatic way of doing that is literally “What your health?” you have to add the appropriate ending to [shalom], which means health or state-of-being, as well as hello and peace.
3 comments:
This is INSANE! Languages are so wacky.
The verbs change depending on the gender of the speaker... Wow. So you can look at a traffic sign or a product label and tell whether it is a man or a woman?
And the way that "health" changes depending on the gender of the person possessing it... it's interesting all the little ways that our languages have for encoding the genders of the people who being discussed. It helps you if you need to add gender information to your sentence unobtrusively, but is such a pain when you need to get rid of gender information.
What do they do in Israel if they need to use verbs on some paper form that is filled out by people of both sexes?
I don't technically know what the answers to these questions would be, but my best guess is that in order to work around such gender restrictions they can take advantage of the ambiguity of their writing system. Notice that I wrote "your health" with the vowels, but remember that they don't usually write the vowels in everyday communication, and if you left off the vowels, both genders of the word would look the same. A human being can deduce the context and pronounce the word with the correct inflection, but a product label is not required to provide such detailed information. That certainly works in this case; I don't really know any specific verb conjugations yet.
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