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So verbs in Semitic languages are almost always composed of a root made up of 3 consonants. This makes translating alternately easier and harder: easier, in that you get the meaning from the root and then the other letters added on the front and the back tell you what the tense, number, binyan (verbal pattern), etc. are; hard, because some verbs have one letter missing/variable/otherwise funky. So the word “qwm”, which means “arise, stand,” is termed a “middle-weak” word, because its middle root, W, is mostly a placeholder and drops out at every available opportunity. The “placeholding” root varies–usually W or Y or aleph.
In Syriac, I have learned, these are called “sick” letters. They are “sick in the middle” or “sick at the beginning” or “sick at the end.” Naturally I found this beyond hilarious. There are a ton of very common “sick at the end” words–the words for “to see,” “to drink,” “to call,” “to fill,” are all of this type. Yesterday we were going over some participial form for this irregular verb type, and the professor (who is just wonderful) went through them: “You see? hazyo’, shatyo’, qaryo’, malyo’. They’re all SICK.”
I am pretty sure he had no idea what I found so funny.
Okay so this is my biggest problem with Hebrew, one that’s dogged me in for the entire 7 years since I began studying it (wow, that’s a lot of time to have accomplished remarkably little), and since I can’t get any paying work done today (I am recording books for a visually impaired student, my recorder is full, and I am waiting for my boss to track down the software that allows me to transfer the files from the machine onto my computer) I am going to tell you, dear Internet, all about it. What follows is a rant masquerading as an educational post.
In order to really understand Hebrew–not just muddle your way through, but to GET it, and to know WHY weird forms do what they do, and in order to predict any forms at all, you have to understand a good bit about sound rules in Hebrew.
Linguistic background ahoy: Every language has a set of “permitted” and “forbidden” sequences of sounds–that’s why the word “blurg” sounds like it could be a real word, even though Liz Lemon made it up, but “blgur” doesn’t–English doesn’t permit the sequence “blg”. English is super unusual actually in permitting ANY sequences of three consonants–the word “strike” is a word that just wouldn’t happen in, say, Japanese, which (I think I’m right here?) only allows Consonant-Vowel syllables. So when English words get adopted into Japanese, “filler” vowels get added between any two consecutive consonants, so that the loan word will follow Japanese sound rules. Cool stuff.
Sound rules in Hebrew, at least the ones that are relevant for students, are basically vowel rules. Some vowels can’t follow each other. Some vowels don’t like being with gutterals, some vowels don’t like being too far away from the stressed syllable, some vowels don’t like being in an open unstressed syllable (CV is open, CVC is closed). So you have your basic pattern, and then the vowels shift to different vowels when they get into a situation that’s uncomfortable for them. Example: You can’t have two shewas one after the other (the shewa is the short, neutral vowel you make when you say, “uh…”). So when you would, instead the first syllable goes to an “i” and the second drops out. le-nebi’im, “to prophets,” shifts to linbi’im (I’m using e for shewa because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to insert special characters).
The problem is, these vowel shifts and syllable structures and sound rules, etc. are both incredibly basic to the language–necessary for predicting ANY forms and for recognizing most–and really difficult to understand theoretically if you don’t already know something about linguistics. I still remember poor Dr. Perkins, maybe the smartest person I will ever meet, trying to explain the difference between an open and closed syllable to me while I stared at him blankly and nodded, thinking to myself, “Well, I don’t understand it, but how important can it be?” Ahahaha. To a native speaker, not important at all. It’s all intuitive; you KNOW what sounds right and what doesn’t and you don’t need to bother to reason it out. But to someone learning an ancient language, or at least Hebrew, where you run into sound changes all the time, it’s really important.
There are ways around it, of course–I took the route of trying to memorize every weird form instead of learning the patterns that made them all make sense, then just sticking with it long enough that it began to come intuitively. That’s fine, but here I am, seven years later, and I still feel like translating is like trying to shoot ducks in the dark. Maybe the best way would be to give everyone an introductory linguistics course before they started learning the language–but then Hebrew is a language that’s really important to a lot of non-specialists. A lot of the people who want to learn it just don’t care enough about the fundamental structure of the language to take the time, and why should they? I only learned about sound changes by accident, really–my introductory linguistics course was taken to fulfill the requirements for an English degree that would get me into a school of education in Virginia, because I thought I might want to teach English in public schools.
I guess what I’m getting at is that all the textbooks present these basic building-blocks of the language at the beginning of the textbook, usually in an introductory chapter, when it’s highly unlikely for them to sink in–students just don’t have the framework necessary. You have to understand the sound rules to read the language; but you have to have a basic sense of/experience with the language to understand the sound rules.
Good students probably go back and periodically review the sound rules throughout the time that they’re learning the grammar. I did end up doing this with Aramaic this past spring, and it paid off–I understand how Aramaic functions much better now. But I never did with Hebrew (because I’m lazy lazy lazy with languages) and only now am I beginning to realize just how big a mistake was. I may have said this before, but the main difference between what I’m doing now and what I did during high school and undergrad was that, back then, the languages were a hobby, sort of, just for fun (“fun” being a relative term, of course). They didn’t REALLY matter, because I was going to be an actor/writer/English teacher–they were just something on the side. The grades mattered, sort of, but everyone knows that you can still do pretty well without really knowing a language. Now that I have to ACTUALLY know them, inside and out, things are a little scarier.
Being interested in linguistics is a funny thing. The more I learn about it, the more I get the sense that most people’s conceptions of how languages work and what they do is totally different from linguists’ conceptions of these things. Take the split infinitive, for example (or indeed any other finicky grammatical rule that either bugs you when people get uptight about getting it right or bugs you when people get it wrong). The “rule” is that one shouldn’t separate the “to” from the verb itself (“to go boldly”, not “to boldly go”). The reasoning behind it is that, in Latin and Greek (the languages of knowledge, culture and status for centuries), the infinitive is expressed in a single word (dicere, currere, amare). In other words, because it’s impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, 18th-and 19th-century grammarians (my history is a little fuzzy) decided that it wasn’t “correct” to split it in English, even though separating the “to” from the “go” creates absolutely no conflict in terms of meaning. And yet, most people still assume that keeping the parts of the infinitive together is the right way to use English. Whether they get irritated at people who don’t follow the rule (I have to count myself in this group) or whether they get irritated at people correcting them, there’s still, I feel, a general cultural sense that the rule itself is a valid one.
(If any of my former students read this, they are going to call me a hypocrite; I was pretty hardcore about using standard English grammar in papers. I tried to justify it by arguing that, whether or not the rules have a valid basis, they are still the standard set by the people who hold power in this country; and one of the best ways to get some of that power and make a success of yourself is to write according to the standards by which they’ll judge you. Really, though, it’s just that it BOTHERS me when people make grammatical mistakes. Cognitive dissonance or straightforward hypocrisy? You decide.)
Another linguistic question comes up a lot when Hebrew is discussed. I imagine it’s mostly because Hebrew’s a non-Indo-European language, so its structure is totally different from either English or most of the languages people take in high school; also, it’s a sacred language, so a whole lot of people are pretty invested in texts translated from Hebrew, while relatively few can actually read the original. Well, as close to the original as we can get, which isn’t actually all that close. But that’s another story. The point is that, several times over the past few months, I’ve been in conversations with people who asked me whether and to what extent the structure and vocabulary of Hebrew influences the types and patterns of thought that we find in the Hebrew Bible. That is, does the way that Hebrew grammar works have to do with the way that the “Old Testament mind” works? Let me make one thing very very clear: this is not a dumb question. When I first started learning Hebrew, I was struck with, and enchanted by, its utter alienness of structure and idiom. In the case of poetry especially, it became clear to me that even the best English poetry is a poor substitute for the original; the form of Hebrew Bible poetry (based on parallelism of meaning rather than rhyme or meter) seemed to me ideally suited to the patterns and rhythms of the language. I’m told that this question was a matter of scholarly debate for some time, and like I said, it’s not a dumb hypothesis.
(Also? Before I go any farther, I’d like to point out that I don’t have much of a linguistics background and I can’t really be said to know what I’m talking about by people who actually know about these things. So, grain of salt. Right. Onward.)
Now, though, I get the sense that it’s not really the case, that every “natural” language has the capacity to express whatever thoughts its thinkers damn well please. We can see this in modern Hebrew, which has essentially the same grammatical structure (somewhat simplified) as Biblical Hebrew, and much of the same vocabulary. Admittedly, my exposure to modern Hebrew is limited to six weeks of floundering over “where are the toilets?” and one long-drawn-out struggle with a great article by Mordechai Cogan. But in the latter instance, especially having the English translation of the article to work from as well, it became abundantly clear that Hebrew is just as well suited to expressing ideas drawn from a firmly Western European scholarly tradition as it is to discussing the God of the Hebrew Bible.
Maybe we think that there’s this connection between Hebrew language and “Hebraic” thought because the Bible is essentially our entire corpus of ancient Hebrew. True, we’ve had the Dead Sea Scrolls for the past 60 years or so, but that’s a blip in theological terms. And the mindsets of the writers of the Bible–even such vastly different writers as, say, the Deuteronomist and the author of Ecclesiastes–are still much more similar to each other than they are to ours. So I guess it makes sense to posit that the weltanschauung and the linguistic structure are inherently related, even though I’m increasingly thinking that this isn’t actually the case.
A related-but-different phenomenon is the old saying of “Eskimos have 300 different words for snow but no word for __.” The idea behind this, I think, is that, without the lexical category for a thing or concept, recognition or understanding of the thing or concept is impossible. If you’ve read 1984, Orwell uses the same idea for Newspeak–the government systematically erases the language necessary to express rebellious ideas, and so the capacity to have rebellious ideas disappears from the people’s minds. Only I’m pretty sure language doesn’t work that way. This post from the Language Log several years ago is both deliciously snarky and expresses why, exactly, it doesn’t. It’s also the reason I wrote this behemoth of an entry in the first case. Lastly, I wish to have it on record that I thought Orwell was wrong about the way language and thought are related when I read this my senior year of high school–I distinctly remember having a heated discussion with Mr. Wood and the entire rest of the class about it–and now science proves that I’m right. (Okay, Luke, fine, not science. Science-ish. Science-y things. We need a word for fields that aren’t science but are closer to it than, say, art history.)
During yesterday’s Hebrew reading, Lee and Gail and I chatted about numbers in foreign languages–specifically, why they are so freakishly difficult to remember. I certainly find this to be the case–number words are the hardest vocabulary words to learn and the quickest to slip away when I let a language lapse. I was relieved to find two such eminent linguists, both of whom have spent their professional lives learning and teaching languages, admit to the same difficulty.
This got us onto the topic of language learning itself, and its affinities with both the “left” and “right” sides of your brain (not that I really buy that “left/right” divide, but it’s a handy shorthand). Lee has said that he finds both “English people” and “math people” doing well in Latin, though they tend to approach the material slightly differently. And I am all about the artsy-fartsy big-picture intuitive learning and am still addicted to language learning, whereas Blondie is a straight-up logician for whom Latin is a grand and beautiful puzzle.
Maybe the solution is to teach language and mathematics in conjunction in some way–to trick the students who are into math into thinking they’re in a math class, and trick the students who are into humanities into thinking that they are in a language class. By the time they realize that both language learning and mathematics require the same type of thinking, it will be too late: they’ll have all the multiplication tables memorized in French, and have learned to do the quadratic equation in the finest Attic Greek, and they’ll never mix “three hundred” and “thirty thousand” again, and they’ll never again be able to put themselves in little boxes labeled “bad at math” and “bad at writing.” That, I think, would be a good thing.
