… of my life.
This isn’t even a real post. There are so many in the works. But this particular comic sums up so perfectly my current state of progress that it would be a shame not to share it. And now, it’s back to the sofa.
Subjunctives
13 02 2008A little while ago, I had the following question:
How does a native Israeli Hebrew speaker express a subordinate clause in the subjunctive? Take a statement, for example, like: “That is what she would have wanted”. It would seem that the subjunctive virtually doesn’t exist at all in Biblical Hebrew (excepting certain remnants of older “energic” and cohortative-looking forms) but surely Hebrew speakers today have developed a means of distinguishing it from purely declarative statements?
I asked two people: my friend, Daniel, and my undergrad Hebrew teacher, Dr Shani Berrin. They both gave me the same response:
You do it using a strangely English-translated sounding method – and your sentence comes out as: זה מה שהיא היתה רוצה
(Daniel)I’m not coming up with anything in Classical Hebrew, but modern Hebrew would use perfect plus participle: היתה רוצה
(Shani)
It seems interesting to me that Biblical Hebrew lacks a specific means of conveying the subjunctive (at least, the phase of “Biblical” Hebrew that is represented by the MT), and it also seems interesting to me that the Israeli Hebrew collocation is indistinguishable from the habitual (“that is what she used to want”) and from the iterative (“that is what she wanted from time to time”). Just thought I’d open that up here, and see if anybody has any alternative suggestions for the subjunctive – both in Classical, as well as Israeli, Hebrew.
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Categories : Hebrew
Tagged
4 02 2008I have been tagged, with a bizarre meme:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.
Fortunately for me, the nearest book happens to be Waltke and O’Connor’s, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. It habitually rests on top of a small collection of other books that I have on my desk (a concordance, the KJV, Gesenius’s grammar, the BDB, Arnold and Choi’s guide to syntax, my Peshitta, my Septuagint and my Vulgate). This is fortunate on a number of counts. Firstly, and most obviously, it allows me to post about something of genuine relevance to me; secondly, some of the other books that exist within hands’ reach would have been very difficult to turn into a post of any interest to anybody; and thirdly, the first five sentences on page 123 all constitute examples of verses in the bible, with the following three sentences (exactly) forming a description of a particular grammatical rule, and a neat example of the same. Those three sentences are the following:
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Categories : Bible, Random Musings
The Short Arm of the Law
3 02 2008Yesterday was my brother’s bar-mitzvah! As both an older sibling and his teacher, I was very proud. His parsha was משפטים (“laws”) and spanned Exodus 21 through 24. I did the leyning (לייען = Yiddish, “read”) from the Torah and, as a result, had spent a rather long period of the time with this particular parsha in advance of the day – a period of time that provided me with much material for thought. It is an interesting parsha and some of my favourite verses happen to be found within it. Take, for example, the following (rather dark) examples:
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Categories : Bible, Jewish Tradition
Echoes from the Ether: