It could all be Hebrew to you! Then what would happen to your brain? I can't handle cursive Greek or Hebrew AT ALL. It's so ridiculous just trying to puzzle out the ancient Hebrew with NO VOWELS!!! They had plenty of time....why not use vowels?! DVD: not something you use to watch movies...no, that's the name David......or is it? What if there's a word Dovod or Doved or Davod? All still spelled DVD..... Needless to say, I'm not helping Hannah learn her Torah portion. She's doing fine on her own. ll n hr wn (or all on her own, as normal people would spell.....'sigh.') Can you tell I'm tired? And what would a Hebrew spell-check be like?
I'm learning Hebrew. A friend of mine sent me to what he says is a "really great" online dictionary (Hebrew, English, and Arabic), but I can't use it, as it won't render correctly in either of my browsers.
Making up verb sheets and vocab charts in Word is really difficult, even with a couple of Hebrew fonts, because I have to a) remember the divergent keyboard mapping, which does some weird things, like puts "tzade" mapped to "J" (ok, close your eyes and squint, and it almost makes sense); b) stop touch-typing; and c) remember to hit <- after every letter I type, because I can't set Word to type right-to-left, even if I right-justify everything.
The moral of the story is, I guess, English-speakers have been monopolizing the Internet for a long time, so localization really sucks, especially for languages not in the Roman alphabet, or which have smaller numbers of speakers.
As to the vowels problem, get the "pointed" Hebrew until you learn the vocabulary, I guess. The problem I have is going from Hebrew letters to Roman letters, or vice versa. Looking at an unpointed Hebrew word, especially one where the vowel pronunciation isn't immediately obvious (because, as you know, some of the written vowel letters can make more than one sound), I have trouble figuring out how to transliterate that into English, for whatever reason I might have to do that. For instance, I just got hung up on "forest," ya'ar, yod, ayin, resh. I originally had it transliterated as yair, strictly out of pure iggerance. How am I supposed to know, if I don't know the word, and when no one's been able to explain the rules to me (yet), and there's seemingly no intuitive pattern? Likewise, I have trouble figuring out from transliterated Hebrew (which I can usually read if I know the word) how it should be spelled in Hebrew letters, since there doesn't seem to be a standard Roman-letter transliteration orthography. (Ok, is that "k" actually a "khet," a "kaf," or a "qof"?)
These "multiple letters make multiple sounds" and "can't read the cursive" problems (I'm getting better with the cursive, but still not perfect) make me sympathise with people who are learning English, surely one of the worst languages for zero-phoneme-to-grapheme match and divergent letter forms ever...
For Hebrew worksheets and stuff, pointed (sometimes) and with words written both in book and cursive, I recommend akhlah.com. It's rather Orthodox in outlook (if that might bother you), but the worksheets as worksheets are great for learning the letters and the diacritics. (Hooked on Akhlah worked for me! :) )
Thanks for the info. I can handle Orthodox for the website. I agree with the keyboarding. In talking with Hebrew speakers who were bilingual, I came to find several of them who either had 2 machines or who swapped out different keyboards (that's what I would do.)
J = tzade? Okay, I'm squinting!
The whole difficulty with learning English as a second language is one thing that makes me nutty when native speakers can't be bothered to speak it correctly. I ask people all over the world if speakers of other languages do to them what Americans do to English. I've always been told no.
As I was writing that entry, I was also wondering whether I would wind up feeling the same way about transliterated Hebrew if I ever learned Hebrew (or at least enough of it to match my small knowledge of Greek) ... and the bidirectional typing issues. (IIRC, there are features in the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) web specification to handle that, BTW. Dunno that it helps with the typing of it, but there are features for the display.)
As to butchery of one's own language, I've heard of Parisian teens doing some icky stuff to French (but I got the impression that they grow out of it). Part of what we've got in the US is pocket dialects that shift too frequently to track easily and have blurred and overlapping geography. And part of it is just ... cussedness, I suspect. The "can't be bothered" aspect bugs me too. I love this language.
I **LOVE** English, too. The cussedness, as you call it, is exactly my objection in this matter. I'm in the Midwest, land of little-to-no dialect (actually, that's a whole separate issue.) It's all the people who say "I seen him" or "me and him..." etc. , despite having a decent education and, rich or poor, all having had ready access to TV,who drive me nutty with this habit. Even Jerry Springer speaks with appropriate subject-verb agreement. It's a *choice* to speak the lazy English and by that very fact, the choice to do so rankles me.
Apparently "even Jerry Springer" isn't appropriate. There was a This American Life (NPR radio show) about him, and apparently he was a brilliant progressive politician who ended up with a sleazy tv show for reasons that I can't remember. (This assumes that the segment about his was factual--"This American Life" doesn't always label fiction and non-fiction.
I didn't mean Jerry's personal linguistic choices were gramatically incorrect at all. He's clearly intelligent; he's politically savvy and knows how to appeal to the large, lowest-common-denominator segment of the population. I was more referring to his audience and their verbal skills (or lack thereof.) I should have stated that more clearly :-)
This is Interrobang posting, and I posted the last entry on Hebrew, too. Glenn would know, because Glenn knows I'm learning Hebrew, but you don't know me. Anyway...
I'm given to understand that speakers of other languages do speak in ways analogous to "lazy English." Quebec French is rife with examples -- many perfectly grammatical Quebecois(e) expressions are scarily incorrect in Parisian French. My Parisian French friend has also been teaching me a lot of their French slang. He says my syntax is funny, and to him it probably is. Spanish also allows for a great deal of laziness in speech -- don't want to put pronouns? Don't have to! The same with Japanese. Also, an increasing proportion of Japanese slang/vernacular words are corrupted loanwords from English, like "wapuro" for "word processor," or "pokkekon" for "pocket computer" (PDA). There are also entire verb conjugations in Japanese which are considered slangy and "impolite" -- a polite speaker would say, for instance, "Nani desu ka?" [What is it?] but people speaking in a less formal or polite (or more masculine) way would say, "Nan da?" Listening to half an hour of subtitled anime will give one an excellent feel for ungrammatical Japanese as spoken by native speakers, even if one's competency in the language is severely limited. As far as Hebrew goes, I've read that analogues for even ungrammatical English contractions (such as "ain't") exist in vernacular Hebrew (see Lewis Glinert on that one), and my Israeli friend Gauche is busily teaching me some, er, less formal Hebrew expressions so, should I ever get to visit my tree, I don't sound like a total rube. (For instance, when I said, "Ma shlomech?" he said "Say 'Ma nishma?'! It sounds better!")
That about puts me out of languages upon which I can opine from first-hand experience.
I still maintain that no native English speaker has the right to complain too loudly about other languages' orthographies, though. :)
Thanks for the intro. Good to know you. I'd happily have any friend of Glenn's be a friend of mine.
I've mostly discussed this grammar issue with people who are dealing with doing business overseas, so I think that did slant the perspective in the conversation. I wasn't really talking about slang per se. I had a long talk with a man who has been working all over Asia and in some European countries for the past 6-8 years. My question wasn't dialect or slang-related. I know both of those exist. I'm not really sure whether I consider saying "I seen him." to be slang. I don't think so. When my 8th graders as "'Sup?" that's slang. They are all interacting within a group that is using the slang intentionally, as part of the group's culture, if you will. But when my fairly well-educated former neighbor comes over to talk, she *knows* I can't stand that whole "I seen him" way she talks and I know she knows better. But she still does it. I have a classmate who is student teaching **right now** and says things like "me and him" all the time. Would you consider that slang? My oldest daughter is a huge anime fan, so I know lots of those Japanese quirks of shaping an English word to fit the Japanese mouth. I don't consider that slang or linguistic laziness. In fact, I find that adaptive import appealing and totally Japanese in nature. One of the absolute best parts of the English language is the vast number of synonyms many words have from our historical adaptations from other languages. It makes English so expressive to be able to choose between the synonyms derived from Romance languages which are more descriptive, emotional, and decorative and those derived from other languages (Germanic springs immediately to mind) which are less emotional, more precise and logical.
The comparison between Parisian French and Quebecois isn't quite this area, either. If I were comparing British English to American English, the situations might be more analogous. My question is not differences between separate groups, but variations within one group. So, do Parisian French speakers fracture Parisian French grammar the way many Chicagoans butcher say, subject-verb agreement? My overseas traveling acquaintance said that he never encountered the same level of grammatical slaughter in any other language as he did and does in English.
So, why are you learning Hebrew? For the first time in my life, I'm meeting a fair amount of Christians who are studying it as part of larger Bible studies. I'm finding that coping with the fibro and all my current studies and family responsibilities are crowding out any chance at expanding my Hebrew (despite having a willing tutor in my daughter.) Someday, maybe. I'm just glad to be well enough to manage everything I'm already doing!
Cursive....and left-to-right
I can't handle cursive Greek or Hebrew AT ALL. It's so ridiculous just trying to puzzle out the ancient Hebrew with NO VOWELS!!! They had plenty of time....why not use vowels?! DVD: not something you use to watch movies...no, that's the name David......or is it? What if there's a word Dovod or Doved or Davod? All still spelled DVD..... Needless to say, I'm not helping Hannah learn her Torah portion. She's doing fine on her own. ll n hr wn (or all on her own, as normal people would spell.....'sigh.')
Can you tell I'm tired? And what would a Hebrew spell-check be like?
Ah ha ha! I was just gonna post the same thing!
Making up verb sheets and vocab charts in Word is really difficult, even with a couple of Hebrew fonts, because I have to a) remember the divergent keyboard mapping, which does some weird things, like puts "tzade" mapped to "J" (ok, close your eyes and squint, and it almost makes sense); b) stop touch-typing; and c) remember to hit <- after every letter I type, because I can't set Word to type right-to-left, even if I right-justify everything.
The moral of the story is, I guess, English-speakers have been monopolizing the Internet for a long time, so localization really sucks, especially for languages not in the Roman alphabet, or which have smaller numbers of speakers.
As to the vowels problem, get the "pointed" Hebrew until you learn the vocabulary, I guess. The problem I have is going from Hebrew letters to Roman letters, or vice versa. Looking at an unpointed Hebrew word, especially one where the vowel pronunciation isn't immediately obvious (because, as you know, some of the written vowel letters can make more than one sound), I have trouble figuring out how to transliterate that into English, for whatever reason I might have to do that. For instance, I just got hung up on "forest," ya'ar, yod, ayin, resh. I originally had it transliterated as yair, strictly out of pure iggerance. How am I supposed to know, if I don't know the word, and when no one's been able to explain the rules to me (yet), and there's seemingly no intuitive pattern? Likewise, I have trouble figuring out from transliterated Hebrew (which I can usually read if I know the word) how it should be spelled in Hebrew letters, since there doesn't seem to be a standard Roman-letter transliteration orthography. (Ok, is that "k" actually a "khet," a "kaf," or a "qof"?)
These "multiple letters make multiple sounds" and "can't read the cursive" problems (I'm getting better with the cursive, but still not perfect) make me sympathise with people who are learning English, surely one of the worst languages for zero-phoneme-to-grapheme match and divergent letter forms ever...
For Hebrew worksheets and stuff, pointed (sometimes) and with words written both in book and cursive, I recommend akhlah.com. It's rather Orthodox in outlook (if that might bother you), but the worksheets as worksheets are great for learning the letters and the diacritics. (Hooked on Akhlah worked for me! :) )
Re: Ah ha ha! I was just gonna post the same thing!
J = tzade? Okay, I'm squinting!
The whole difficulty with learning English as a second language is one thing that makes me nutty when native speakers can't be bothered to speak it correctly. I ask people all over the world if speakers of other languages do to them what Americans do to English. I've always been told no.
Re: Ah ha ha! I was just gonna post the same thing!
As to butchery of one's own language, I've heard of Parisian teens doing some icky stuff to French (but I got the impression that they grow out of it). Part of what we've got in the US is pocket dialects that shift too frequently to track easily and have blurred and overlapping geography. And part of it is just ... cussedness, I suspect. The "can't be bothered" aspect bugs me too. I love this language.
Re: Ah ha ha! I was just gonna post the same thing!
The cussedness, as you call it, is exactly my objection in this matter. I'm in the Midwest, land of little-to-no dialect (actually, that's a whole separate issue.) It's all the people who say "I seen him" or "me and him..." etc. , despite having a decent education and, rich or poor, all having had ready access to TV,who drive me nutty with this habit.
Even Jerry Springer speaks with appropriate subject-verb agreement. It's a *choice* to speak the lazy English and by that very fact, the choice to do so rankles me.
Re: Ah ha ha! I was just gonna post the same thing!
Apparently "even Jerry Springer" isn't appropriate. There was a This American Life (NPR radio show) about him, and apparently he was a brilliant progressive politician who ended up with a sleazy tv show for reasons that I can't remember. (This assumes that the segment about his was factual--"This American Life" doesn't always label fiction and non-fiction.
Jerry Springer
Maybe you haven't been asking in the right places?
I'm given to understand that speakers of other languages do speak in ways analogous to "lazy English." Quebec French is rife with examples -- many perfectly grammatical Quebecois(e) expressions are scarily incorrect in Parisian French. My Parisian French friend has also been teaching me a lot of their French slang. He says my syntax is funny, and to him it probably is. Spanish also allows for a great deal of laziness in speech -- don't want to put pronouns? Don't have to! The same with Japanese. Also, an increasing proportion of Japanese slang/vernacular words are corrupted loanwords from English, like "wapuro" for "word processor," or "pokkekon" for "pocket computer" (PDA). There are also entire verb conjugations in Japanese which are considered slangy and "impolite" -- a polite speaker would say, for instance, "Nani desu ka?" [What is it?] but people speaking in a less formal or polite (or more masculine) way would say, "Nan da?" Listening to half an hour of subtitled anime will give one an excellent feel for ungrammatical Japanese as spoken by native speakers, even if one's competency in the language is severely limited. As far as Hebrew goes, I've read that analogues for even ungrammatical English contractions (such as "ain't") exist in vernacular Hebrew (see Lewis Glinert on that one), and my Israeli friend Gauche is busily teaching me some, er, less formal Hebrew expressions so, should I ever get to visit my tree, I don't sound like a total rube. (For instance, when I said, "Ma shlomech?" he said "Say 'Ma nishma?'! It sounds better!")
That about puts me out of languages upon which I can opine from first-hand experience.
I still maintain that no native English speaker has the right to complain too loudly about other languages' orthographies, though. :)
Re: Maybe you haven't been asking in the right places?
Thanks for the intro. Good to know you. I'd happily have any friend of Glenn's be a friend of mine.
I've mostly discussed this grammar issue with people who are dealing with doing business overseas, so I think that did slant the perspective in the conversation.
I wasn't really talking about slang per se. I had a long talk with a man who has been working all over Asia and in some European countries for the past 6-8 years. My question wasn't dialect or slang-related. I know both of those exist. I'm not really sure whether I consider saying "I seen him." to be slang. I don't think so. When my 8th graders as "'Sup?" that's slang. They are all interacting within a group that is using the slang intentionally, as part of the group's culture, if you will. But when my fairly well-educated former neighbor comes over to talk, she *knows* I can't stand that whole "I seen him" way she talks and I know she knows better. But she still does it. I have a classmate who is student teaching **right now** and says things like "me and him" all the time. Would you consider that slang?
My oldest daughter is a huge anime fan, so I know lots of those Japanese quirks of shaping an English word to fit the Japanese mouth. I don't consider that slang or linguistic laziness. In fact, I find that adaptive import appealing and totally Japanese in nature. One of the absolute best parts of the English language is the vast number of synonyms many words have from our historical adaptations from other languages. It makes English so expressive to be able to choose between the synonyms derived from Romance languages which are more descriptive, emotional, and decorative and those derived from other languages (Germanic springs immediately to mind) which are less emotional, more precise and logical.
The comparison between Parisian French and Quebecois isn't quite this area, either. If I were comparing British English to American English, the situations might be more analogous. My question is not differences between separate groups, but variations within one group. So, do Parisian French speakers fracture Parisian French grammar the way many Chicagoans butcher say, subject-verb agreement? My overseas traveling acquaintance said that he never encountered the same level of grammatical slaughter in any other language as he did and does in English.
So, why are you learning Hebrew? For the first time in my life, I'm meeting a fair amount of Christians who are studying it as part of larger Bible studies. I'm finding that coping with the fibro and all my current studies and family responsibilities are crowding out any chance at expanding my Hebrew (despite having a willing tutor in my daughter.) Someday, maybe. I'm just glad to be well enough to manage everything I'm already doing!