Shalom

Shalom.

That ancient Hebrew word, variously meaning “hello,” “good-bye,” and “peace,” seems a fitting way to inaugurate this column on the glamour of the grammar.

Related to shalem (“complete”), the greeting includes hopeful notes of tranquility and completeness. The root of the word, Sh.L.M, also gives us l’shalem, “to pay,” because you complete a (legal) transaction by paying for what you have taken; and l’hashlim, “to complete,” or, as high-school students know it, to make up missed work.

“…it’s akin to concluding with, ‘Well, it’s been nice, but enough of this jabbering on the phone. We both have more important things to do. Bye.’ “

The official hourly Hebrew news broadcasts from the Voice of Israel begin shalom rav, that is, “great peace,” but also “hello!” (During the second Lebanese war, some broadcasters dropped the word rav in a subtle nod to the violence and to the national state of unease that it caused.)

A more traditional greeting is longer: shalom aleichem, that is, “peace be upon you.” It comes ready made with a built-in response: aleichem shalom, “upon you be peace,” or the slightly more formal va’aleichem hashalom, “and upon you be the peace.”

But when Israelis greet one another on the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, it is not shalom or a longer variation of it, but rather the colloquial ahalan that is most often heard.

The Birds and the Bees

Unlike in English, Hebrew nouns, verbs, and adjectives come in two varieties, commonly called masculine and feminine. The endings –a (singular) and –ot (plural) frequently mark the feminine, and while the masculine nouns have no particular ending in the singular, typically their plural marker is –im. So “man” is ish and “woman” is isha. Adjectives (which in Hebrew follow the nouns they describe) match: ish tov is a “good man” and isha tova is a “good woman.”

But that’s just the beginning of the story.

Some words, like even (“rock”; plural, avanim) are feminine even though they don’t end in –a or –ot. So we have avanim tovot, “good stones.” Others, like m’onot (“dormitories”), take –ot in the plural even though they are masculine. A few words, like ru’ach (“wind”) or shemesh (“sun”) are both masculine and feminine.

“The zebra (zehbra) is always feminine; there is no zabar for her to marry.”

Animal terms are even more complicated. While we find para (“cow”) to match par (“bull”), an “ant” is a n’mala in Hebrew, and even though the plural is n’malim, they’re always girls. Bees (d’vora; plural, d’vorim), at least in common parlance, are always feminine, as are birds (e.g., tzipor tova, “a good bird”). Specific species like the eagle (ayit), though, can be masculine. The zebra (zehbra) is always feminine; there is no zabar for her to marry. But in polite company, dogs in Hebrew (kelev; plural, k’lavim), like in English, are always masculine.

What is Et?

“Can you explain the purpose and origin of et?” asks a reader.

I can (and I will), but a short word is often a sign of complexity in language, and the answer will meander through the nature of nouns and four varieties of verb.

The issue is this. Whereas in English we content ourselves with, “I drew the flower,” Hebrew requires an extra word: “I drew et the flower.” (tziyarti et ha-perach) But why? The traditional explanation, that “et is a direct object marker,” is only partly right and often even less helpful.

“Bonus question for Hebrew speakers: Two verbs in Hebrew are doubly transitive, taking two objects, each potentially with an et before it. Can you identify them?”

Verbs come in varying complexity. Some, like “rain,” are self contained. The “it” in “it’s raining” doesn’t refer to anything in particular, perhaps not even to “rain.” (It can “rain confetti.”) Other verbs, like “walk,” need a doer. There’s no walking going on without a walk-er. Moving up the ladder we find verbs that involve two parties, someone to do the verb, and someone to whom the verb is done: “I gave” is incomplete. “I gave an example” is better.

By and large, these verbs that involve two external parties are called “transitive.” The first external party (technically called an “argument” of the verb) is called the “subject” and the second is called the “object.”

There are two kinds of objects. Some are so closely connected with the verb that they earn the designation “direct object.” The “flower” in “I drew a flower” is a direct object. So is “the article” in “I read the article.” Other objects complement the verb in more indirect ways. In “I wrote a letter of praise to the Jerusalem Post,” we find one direct object (“a letter of praise”) and one indirect object (“to the Jerusalem Post.”)

And Another Thing

“Why does a Vav turn the future into the past in Hebrew?” asks a reader. It’s a great question, with a fascinating answer.

The reader is referring to vav ha-hipuch, the “changing” Vav, which, in biblical Hebrew — but not modern Hebrew — appears to change verbs from the past tense into the future and vice versa.

Normally, in both biblical and modern Hebrew, a prefixed Vav means “and.” “Eilat and Tel Aviv” in Hebrew is eilat v’tel aviv. But in biblical Hebrew, the Vav seems to have an additional function. While y’dabeir means “he will speak,” vay’dabeir — with a Vav before the verb — means either “and he will speak” or “he spoke,” as in the very common vay’dabeir Adonai el mosheh (“Adonai spoke to Moses.”) It works the other way around, too. While haya means “he was,” v’haya means either “and he was” or “he will be.”

But we know from linguistics that letters don’t magically change the tenses on verbs, so something else must be going on. We also know from linguistics that tense patterns vary widely within a language depending on circumstances.

“When a waiter at a fancy restaurant asks, `did you want desert tonight?’ the wrong answer is, `yes, I did, but it’s too late now.’ “

For example, formal English prefers the past tense, as when a waiter at a fancy restaurant asks, “did you want desert tonight?” (The wrong answer is, “yes, I did, but it’s too late now.”) Similarly, news about the past is often presented in the present tense: “Four rockets land in uninhabited areas in the north,” might be the beginning of a newscast. Sports sometimes requires the future tense for what has already happened: After Maccabee Tel Aviv scores a winning goal seconds before the end of the game, the sports announcer cries, “and that’ll be the game!” Will be? Why not “was”?

And Yet Another Thing

Recently we saw the power of the word “and” in Hebrew. But who would have thought it could be so hard to say? Though it’s always written as a prefixed Vav, the word enjoys no fewer than seven pronunciations.

The basic version is simply v’-. So “and Tel Aviv” is just v’tel aviv. But Hebrew doesn’t stop there.

Always available is the option of pronouncing v’- as va-, though usually we find that longer form only between two short words of a pair, as in yom valaila, “day and night.”

The letters Bet, Vav, Mem, and Peh, which go by the acronym bumaf, form an interesting class. When these labials (so called because they represent sounds made with the lips) start a word, they change the prefix meaning “and” from v’- to u-. So, properly speaking, “and Miriam” in Hebrew is not v’miryam but rather umiryam. “And what?” is uma? Because the letters that change v’- into u- are the “bumaf” letters, grammarians call this rule bumaf. (See, metonymy pops up all over the place.)

“Accordingly, ‘and a ship’ is not v’oniyah, but rather the truly astonishing vo’oniyah.”

Now, the bumaf rule in Israeli Hebrew is largely prescriptive, which is to say, a “rule” that’s usually ignored. Why should we care about it all, then? For two reasons. Careful speakers and newscasters still follow it, and we find it in biblical Hebrew. Interestingly, even Israelis who don’t use this rule understand those who do.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Words

New nouns enter Hebrew in multiple ways. Today we’ll look at three of them.

The first, onomatopoeia (literally, “word making”) is when a word reflects the sound associated with what it represents. Nearly every language has this process. In antiquity, it produced one of my favorite Hebrew words: bakbuk. It means “bottle,” and it sounds like what happens when liquid is poured from it: bakBUKbakBUK…. Other examples include ra’am (“thunder”) and the almost-cruel m’gam’g’man (“stutterer” — an equally unfair English example of onomatopoeia).

When William Golding chose a slight variation of this translation — “Lord of the Flies” — for the title of his book, he used a classic combination of Hebrew imagery and onomatopoeia to allude to the Devil’s presence.

A “fly” in Hebrew is a zvuv, reflective of the zvzvzvzvzv sound the insect makes. (People who think they don’t let small things bother them haven’t spent time in a room with one zvuv.) Perhaps in recognition of the subtle insipid squeaking of the fly, one name for the Devil is ba’al-zvuv, that is “fly-lord.” When William Golding chose a slight variation of this translation — “Lord of the Flies” — for the title of his book, he used a classic combination of Hebrew imagery and onomatopoeia to allude to the Devil’s presence.

A second way to make words in Hebrew is more modern: two words are crammed together to create a third. From remez (“hint”) and or (“light”) we get ramzor, “traffic light.” (Hopefully the traffic light is more than a hint, though, sadly, traffic statistics in Israel suggest otherwise.) Vowels in Hebrew change to fit their linguistic circumstances, so remez becomes ramz here. In a similar vein, zarak is “threw,” and zarkor is a “spotlight.” Kaspomat, that is, “ATM,” or “automated teller machine,” but really “money vending machine,” comes from kesef (“money”) and otomat (“automat” or “vending machine”). In future weeks we’ll address why and how the vowels change, and why the “f” of kesef becomes a “p.”

Can I Borrow a Word?

A friend recently asked me in Hebrew, “How do you say karboorator in English?” “Carburetor?” I suggested.

“The thing is, the ekspres bus in Israel is the local service. How did that happen?”

Many words in Hebrew come from English, and vice versa. (Though as it happens, there is a “real” word in Hebrew for “carburetor”: m’ayed, literally, “vaporizer,” ultimately from the word ed, “mist.”) Typically called “loan words” — even though it’s not a loan and the words are never returned — some cross seamlessly from language to language; others morph along the way.

English speakers instantly recognize common Hebrew nouns such as dolfeen, horoskop, veetameen, and many others. Frequently an English word will be Hebreicized slightly, as with feelosof for “philosopher” or eteemologya for “etymology.” (The word “etymology” itself traces its roots back to the Greek etymon [“true”] and logia [“study of”]. “Etymology” literally means the “true meaning of the word,” though frequently the etymological meaning is not the true meaning at all. But that’s for another day.) Other times, the Hebrew form of the word differs slightly from its English counterpart, such as peengween for “penguin.”

More interesting are the words whose meaning changes when they move into Hebrew. From the English proper noun “Cornflakes” we get the popular Hebrew word kornflayks, which means “breakfast cereal.” In Hebrew, “Rice Krispies” is one kind of “kornflayks.” This transition from specific to more general is common. Another example is the Hebrew bak aks, from the English “back axle.” It means “axle” and your car has two of them, the bak aks achori (“rear back axle”) and the bak aks kidmi (“front back axle”).

The opposite of generalization is specialization. The English word “concert” yields the Hebrew kontzert, which means “classical music concert.” (When David Broza plays, it’s called a hofa’a, or “appearance,” in Hebrew.)

It’s Like This

The Hebrew word for “like” — that is, “akin to,” not “hold in endearment” — is the prefix k’-, written as a single letter Kaf. Like a handful of other Hebrew words, it never stands by itself, and therefore enjoys the technical name “clitic.” The two-word English phrase “Like Miriam,” for example, is the one-word k’miryam in Hebrew.

The opposite of ma zeh isn’t lo ma zeh, but rather the truly bizarre lo mi yode’a ma, literally, “not who knows what.”

Another way of expressing the same thing is k’mo miryam, in which we see the clitic k’- attached to an archaic pleonastic. “Archaic” means no longer used, and “pleonastic” refers to a word that doesn’t contribute any meaning. (And we add “archaic pleonastic” to our growing list of words and phrases you might use in a conversation to get an interlocutor to stop talking to you.) The usual example of a pleonastic in English is the “it” in “it is raining.” The word sits in the sentence for grammatical reasons but doesn’t mean anything. Mo is an archaic form of the word ma (“what”), so k’mo literally means “like what,” and it’s a stand-alone form of the prefix k-.

In English, we use “like” to express similarity (“The Technion is like M.I.T.”) but also, at least for some speakers, either pleonastically or to express general fuzziness of thought: “To go to the Technion you have to be, like, smart.” The Hebrew kazeh, literally, “like this,” — zeh is pleonastic, too — works the same way in Hebrew, for roughly the same kinds of speakers. “He’s smart” is hu chacham. “He’s, like, smart” is hu chacham kazeh. (Another week we’ll discuss why the word isn’t the shorter k’ze.)

Have it Your Way

Recently we discussed the Hebrew word et. In response, many readers wrote me impassioned notes about how that word interacts with the word yesh, which literally means “there is/are” and more generally is used to express possession in Hebrew. So let’s tackle that word, and its partner, ein (“there isn’t/aren’t”).

Purists object. They disapprove of this seeming Americanization, or, at least, foreignization of Hebrew. They long for the days when subjects were subjects and objects were objects. They fear that the misuse of et will prove to be the loose thread that inevitably leads to the unraveling of the very fabric of civilized discourse.

The word yesh expresses existence. Yesh b’ayah means “there is a problem.” (Hebrew doesn’t have a word for “a” or “an,” simplifying matters in this case.) Because the word doesn’t decline for number, “there are four problems” uses the same word yesh: yesh arba b’ayot.

The opposite of yesh is ein, as in the colloquial ein b’ayah, which literally means “there is no problem” and which deserves the chattier translation “no problem!” “There aren’t four problems” is ein arba b’ayot.

Hebrew doesn’t have a verb “to have,” using, in its place, a construction involving yesh or ein. For example, “I have a problem” is yesh li b’ayah. Li means “to me,” so the phrase literally means “there is to me a problem,” a wording that Russian speakers find intuitive (because it nicely matches their u menja problema). But the phrase sounds so odd to English speakers that they are frequently tempted to imbue the Hebrew with more depth than it has. However, it just means “I have a problem.” No more, no less. The opposite, ein li b’ayah, simply means “I don’t have a problem.”

So why did so many people write me about yesh and et? Et, you may recall, comes before a definite direct object. In English, which has a verb “to have,” that which is had is the direct object (if you’ll pardon my phrasing). In “I have the book,” “the book” is the direct object.

But in the Hebrew equivalent, ha-sefer (“the book”) is technically the subject, not the object, and subjects in Hebrew don’t get et. So yesh li ha-sefer should be grammatical in modern Hebrew. But it’s not. Speakers who use that phrase may as well wear a lapel button, “I’m following the rules I learned but I don’t speak the language.” In Israeli Hebrew, there’s only one way to say, “I have the book”: yesh li et ha-sefer.

What To Do?

A reader from Akko wants to know how to make infinitives in Hebrew.

On the one hand, it’s easy. Add the prefix l- (“to”) to the beginning of the word. But nothing is ever that easy.

When we looked at v- (“and”), we saw a surprising variety of vowels under one simple prefix. The vowels under l- behave similarly. So that’s one complication. Secondly, we have to know what to put l- before; that’s a second complication. A third complication is both the most difficult and the most interesting. Letters jump in and out of infinitives.

Nuns in general are mischievous, and this is only one example of a general plot on their part to confuse students of Hebrew.

We’ll cover Complication 1, the vowels, in more detail another time, making do now with a short approximation of what’s going on. There are four patterns. The vowel under the Lamed is a Kamatz (“a” sound) if the word is very short; a Sh’va (silent) if the word is longer; a Chiriq (“i” sound) before another letter with a Sh’va under it; and before a chataf-vowel, the Lamed copies the vowel it precedes. (You might remember the chataf-vowels from several weeks ago. If not, don’t worry about it. We’ll go over them again soon.) Examples of the four patterns are these: lasim, “to put,” l’daber, “to speak,” lishmor, “to keep,” and le’ehov, “to love.”

A short approximation of the second complication will also have to do for now. The Lamed attaches to the masculine singular imperative (command form) of the verb. Daber is “speak!” and l’daber is “to speak.”

What about the letters that jump in and out?

If the first letter of the imperative is a Nun with a Sh’va under it, the Nun optionally drops out. (The Sh’va of course drops out, too. We can’t have vowels hanging out with no consonants over them.) “To fall,” from the root n.p.l, is lipol, not linpol. Nuns in general are mischievous, and this is only one example of a general plot on their part to confuse students of Hebrew. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately — at this point it’s hard to tell the difference — when letters, including Nuns, drop out of a word, they usually leave behind a hint of their prior existence: a Dagesh. So there’s a dot in the Peh of lipol.

Four letters drop out of infinitives without leaving a Dagesh: