Footnotes

Aharoni Manual of Style, paragraph 392: A footnote must fit on one page, no matter what.

How do you look up words in a Hebrew dictionary?

How do you look up words in a Hebrew dictionary?

For this post i would like to get as many comments as possible. If you are more comfortable reading or writing in Russian or in Hebrew, please see:

• The same post in Russian: Как вы ищете слова в словарях иврита?
• The same post in Hebrew: איך אתם מחפשים מילים במילון עברי?

What is difficult for you?

Is it difficult to find the root of the word? (This is relevant mostly for verbs, but in some dictionaries also for nouns.) How do you prefer to search for verbs – by the root, by the infinitive, by the past (perfect) tense, by the present (participle) tense?

Is it hard for you to separate the prefixes (conjunctions, prepositions) and the suffixes (tense, possession)?

Do you have any trouble reading Hebrew with or without vowel points (niqqud)? Do you need transcription in easy-to-read Latin characters or in IPA?

Do you understand abbreviations such as vt, n.pr.m., adv., impv., זו”נ‎, פעו”י‎, מ”ג‎, נ”ר? Do you notice them at all? Do they bother you in any way?

Do you remember any words that were particularly hard to find? Words or expressions, in order to find which you had to open several dictionaries? Words that you couldn’t find at all, anywhere?

Do you have any particular problems with the usage of the letters א‎, ו‎, י for vowels? If you can’t find the word תוכנה, do you know that you should try searching for תכנה? Is there a dictionary that you prefer, because it has a system for the usage of these letters that you like?

Do you have a preferred dictionary in general or a dictionary that you don’t like? Why? I am talking about mono- and bi-lingual ones, and about printed and electronic: Even-Shoshan, Ben-Yehuda, Gur, Ariel, BDB, Rav-Millim, Alkalai, Sapir, Ha-hove, Morfix etc.

These questions may seem a bit generic, but i am curious mostly about the aspect of using the dictionary and not general language difficulties.

Please write whatever comes to your mind, even if you think that it is embarrassing or too simple. Feel free to answer anonymously or to email me at amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il.

Many, many thanks in advance.

Thesaurus

The second best way to enhance your English vocabulary is to read a thesaurus.

The best way is to read music reviews. Here’s what Robert Christgau has to say about Yo La Tengo’s Electr-O-Pura:

Brimful of punk, fuzz, feedback, noise, and the lovingly amped squelches of fingers sliding off strings, their seventh album is a subcultural tour de force, luxuriating so sybaritically in guitar sound that I’m reluctant to mention that the tunes are pretty good. That’s why it’s the best record they’ve ever made, though.

I thought that “sybaritically” is a typo.

You

YouTube may be a competitor to Wikipedia as one of the most massively multilingual sites on the web.

Many people who comment there don’t seem to care that English is the lingua franca of the web. They just write in Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Catalan and Croatian and it creates a soup of languages. And that is a Very Good Thing. It makes languages seen and promotes tolerance. Variety and tolerance are mighty good.

Reality – Oh Your God

Tourist sign at Banias

This is a sign for tourists that explains about the Banias archaeological site in the Golan Heights. Take a closer look here:

GOD corrected to gOD

Notice that someone vandalized this sign and corrected “GOD PAN” to “gOD PAN”. My guess is that it was a person who found it offensive that a Greek god is called a “God” with a capital letter and he wanted to tell that it’s just a meaningless pagan lesser god. The text is in all-caps, so capital and small letters are not supposed to be different, but they did matter to that vandal in some way.

By a coincidence—or maybe not?—this is similar to the name of the band dEUS, whose recently released new album “Vantage Point” is surprisingly good.

Swiss, part 2

OK, i couldn’t resist, here a few more comments about languages in that Slashdot article about languages:

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[Learn] Girlspeak.

I’m currently living with four (4) girls (three daughters, wife) all of which are able to speak in riddles and conundrums that they themselves understand, while leaving me completely at a loss of any valuable information.

Interestingly enough, this Girlspeak language transcends cultural boundaries! It is simply amazing how two girls can communicate without actually knowing the native tongue of the other.

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adding German to my curriculum tacked one extra semester onto my studies. To say it was not encouraged is understating the case: I was told not to waste my time. Years have passed and the rest of my studies are some vague blur involving plumbing; but I can still speak German.

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I learned German for three years, thinking it might be good for science. I even stayed with a German family for six weeks one summer. What I discovered: The Germans mostly speak better English than 3 years worth of German, and they’re usually eager to practice it. Had I learned Spanish instead, at least I could converse with the gardeners around here.

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Germany is the only place where I’ve asked a question in english to someone off the street and have the person turn around and walk away. Sure the french may berate you, but I’d rather like that. Choose your poison.

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Russian is rarely spoken outside of Kaliningrad and Karlovy Vary, but is widely understood (though rarely very welcome.)

Swiss

Learn Swiss……….Swedish hot chicks

From a comment at Learn a Foreign Language As an Engineer?, Slashdot.

The meaning of the name Gaydamak

Lera Henkel asked me: “Can you translate the Russian name Gaydamak into English?”

Gaydamak is not exactly Russian: It came to Russian from Ukrainian, and it came to Ukrainian from Turkish.

The original Ukrainian word is more correctly spelled “Haydamak” in Latin letters, but in case of Mr. Arcadi Gaydamak the custom is to write it with a ‘G’.

For information about who were the original Ukrainian Haydamaks, see the Wikipedia article Haidamaka, which appears to be pretty good.

Lentils and Spinach

On my trip to Catalonia i couldn’t miss the fact that nearly all of the writing on signs there is in Catalan (and in Val d’Aran it’s in Aranese, but that’s a separate story). It’s easy to pick up the basics of Catalan if one knows some French, Italian or Spanish, and i know a little of them all, so I’ve been studying Catalan since. I listened to some music and read some literature in that language, and i’ve been waiting for that great, language-defining sentence. I mean, Catalans love it, ‘cuz it’s their own, and their passion for it is quite infectious, but is there something that will catch my imagination and make me really fall in love with Catalan instead of just adding it to the list of languages which i pretend to know?

I bought four CD’s of Catalan music in Barcelona – Mazoni, Sanjosex, Refree and La Troba Kung-Fú. They are all good, but La Troba Kung-Fú quickly became my “band of the year”. They have a few great catch-phrases on their excellent album; here’s a couple:

“Prou sang pels reis i pels senyors.” – “Stop blood for the kings and for the lords.”

“Calor, calor, que em falta calor, acosta’t una mica per favor.” – “Heat, heat, how I miss heat, get a little closer to me, please”. (You absolutely have to hear the song to get the feeling of it – it’s amazing. There’s an MP3 of “Calor calor” on the website; don’t be ashamed ask me if you can’t get it. If you know the smallest thing about me, then you must agree that if i’m telling that a Latin song is “amazing”, then something must be really special about it. Also note, then “que em” is pronounced as if it was written “cam” and “per” is pronounced as if it was written “par”.)

OK now, but that’s music; music is easier to catch. How about literature?

In addition to a bunch of dictionaries and grammars, i bought two reading books in FNAC Barcelona: Sergi Pàmies’ “Si menges una llimona sense fer ganyotes” (“If You Eat a Lemon Without Making a Grimace”) and Manuel de Pedrolo’s “Mecanoscrit del segon origen” (“Second Origin Typescript”). Pàmies’ book caught my attention in the bookstore because of its funny name, because it was the fourteenth printing since it was first published a year ago (which must mean that it’s popular), and because it was a collection of short stories, which is good for learning a language. I asked a lady who stood nearby what does she think of it; luckily she spoke good English. She told me that it is quite hard and surrealistic and suggested to get the Mecanoscrit.

I read the Mecanoscrit first. According to Wikipedia, this book has been wildly popular among Catalan readers for many years. Indeed, it’s a pretty good book of science fiction and it’s not too hard to read. I enjoyed the plot – except the disappointing ending, and the language was easy enough, but it wasn’t too exciting either.

Hoping to see some more interesting language, i moved to Pàmies. It’s not too surrealistic. It is a bit depressing. It’s funny in some places. Maybe it is funnier for native readers and i just don’t understand it well enough to get the jokes. But it was here, that i finally saw this great sentence, that great language-defining phrase. The story tells about a guy who hates one of his neighbors for some unknown reason:

Si tens preferències de paladar que ni tu mateix t’expliques, i t’estimes més un plat de llenties que no, posem per cas, un d’espinacs, ¿per què no ser igualment arbitrari amb els veïns?

Translation:

If you have taste preferences that even you cannot explain to yourself, and you would like a plate of lentils and not, for example, one of spinach, why then can’t it be equally arbitrary about the neighbors?

Breach

At 01:45 am i received this SMS from a number i didn’t recognize:

hey amir. the police arrived and breached into the car while we found the person who work in nds and left is car here.-Y. Y.

The sender wrote his full name and it is Israeli; it is kept for privacy. NDS is the company in which i still work.

I already slept, so i ignored the beeps from the phone and only read it in the morning. First i was panicky – police? car? breach?, then i was angry – why does he bother to write in English if he can’t?

My car was parked outside and everything was OK. I called him and he didn’t have any idea what was it about. Maybe he works for the leasing company. I don’t know.

Why can’t people just write in their own natural mother tongue? I work in an environment where English is the default and sometimes it is understandable, because it is an international company, and you can’t expect that a CC’d guy in India or Florida will understand Hebrew. But sometimes it goes way over the top.

The Future

Where does the computing world go? I’m not talking just about Free Software, but about the whole industry. Even Microsoft is in trouble here.

What more can we do with computers? What will computers do five years from now that they can’t do today?

Writing documents and university papers can’t get much better than MS-Office, OpenOffice, TeX and DocBook. Each of them caters rather well to their respective markets (except some interoperability issues, which are really rather minor if you put the bizness bullshit aside.)

Music, Movies, Animation? You can’t improve this field much more in the home market, and the high-end market of professional artists and studios is rather narrow. (Although ideas expressed in Lessig’s Free Culture can make it wider …)

Business v1.0 software – databases, billing, CRM, ERP? It is a market of reliability, not innovation.

Websites, communications and social networks? True innovation in that area hit a glass wall long ago, if you ask me. Some websites make up nicer AJAX tricks, but that’s about it.

So i thought that the really innovative thing that can useful on a major scale may lie in the field of Linguistics (disclaimer: I am studying for a B.A. in Linguistics). Speech recognition, text-to-speech and automated translation – all of them are related to Linguistics; none of them can be done right without proper scientific Linguistic preparation.

Microsoft puts “improved” speech recognition into every version of MS-Office, but it is very far from doing it right. Xerox and IBM tried something in their respective (and respected) research labs, but it didn’t see the light of day (at least yet). Google are rumored to be doing something with statistics-based automated translation.

But no-one has anything finalized.

The first one who does it right will rule the whole market for years to come. Of the current players, Google seems to have the best chances to succeed, but it can also be a startup company created by an anonymous undergraduate Liberal Arts student in India, Nigeria or Ukraine. Or Israel?

(Originally published in Bug #1.)

Like this I feel

Talking about Hebraisms in English … I just received a lovely email:

if a user is use BPE than after 3 month he will contact us ( once per life ) to get a license

“Is use” should be “is using” and “than” should be “then”, but the best part is “once per life”.

I am not mocking the person who wrote it. It is wrong to demand that everyone would know English; English is not inherently better or more important than any other language. Contrariwise: I think that email between speakers of one language should be written in that language and not in English, unless there’s a very good reason for that; thus – ideally – Hebrew speakers should write email in Hebrew, and so there would be no reason to make mistakes.

This is just a nice example of a Hebraism. Or maybe not even a Hebraism, but just a non-Anglicism. I somehow understood what the guy meant by “once per life”; I am not sure that everyone would understand it.

Mother Tongue

HLA says on my new Hebrew blog: “It must be noted that it is much more fun for me to read in Hebrew.”

I’m glad to optimize for fun (PDF file).

But it must be noted, that it is not easier for me to read in Hebrew than it is in English. And it is not easier for me to read in Russian than in Hebrew or in English. I can read these three pretty much equally well. And it’s not necessarily good.

I hardly have a mother tongue.

Russian is probably still the best shot if i have to name my mother tongue. When i made my contribution to English Speech Accent Archive (requires QuickTime for audio), i was classified as a Russian speaker; it was academic, but rather artificial. When i speak Hebrew i sometimes makes funny mistakes, Russianisms; being a linguist i become aware of them, but a moment too late. The most common such mistake must be saying phrases such as “We went with my my friend to a movie.” It usually means “I went with a friend to a movie” – two people. In Russian it is perfectly correct to say it – Мы ходили с другом в кино, but in Hebrew and English it is weird. Occasionally i say “да, я, но” instead of “yes, i, but”.

But then i also have occasional Hebraisms slipping into my Russian and English speech and Anglicisms slipping into Hebrew and Russian.

When i read texts about politics and and news in Russian, it feels differently. I can say that it feels more lively and expressive, but i can’t say that it’s easier.

So i hardly have any mother tongue.

Which is probably not that good.

br23, part 2

Uładzimier Katkoŭski, a.k.a. Rydel23 and BR23, passed away yesterday after about a year in coma caused by a road accident. Katkoŭski was the webmaster of Radyjo Svaboda – the Belarusian branch of Radio Liberty, one of the editors of Pravapis – a site dedicated to Belarusian language, and a popular figure in Belarusian Internet culture. I knew him personally through the web and we exchanged some emails. While some people accused him of Belarusian nationalism and Russophobia, he was just a guy who wanted to speak his own language and tried to convince the world to give a little respect to the history of his country, which is considered by nearly everyone as just a bunch of counties in Western Russia.

May his soul rest in peace.

See also:

• Вянок памяці: Уладзімер Каткоўскі – an article in the memory of Katkoŭski at Radyjo Svaboda. It is written in Belarusian; if you know Russian or some other Slavic language, you will understand at least some of it.
• br23 blog. He won a national award for it.
• Rydel’s user page at Wikipedia – he got into heated arguments with Russian editors, at least some of whom were outright Russian nationalist, who did everything to promote the Moscow version of history.
• My older post about br23, with a pretty big discussion.

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Oh (edit): The spelling of his name is inconsistent, because there are several contradicting spelling systems for Belarusian. -mier (-мер) is probably influenced by Polish, while -mir (-мір) leans more towards Russian. And of course i could just call him in the “simple” Russian-influenced form Vladimir Katkovski, but that would totally miss the point – he would certainly like the spelling of his name to be as Belarusian as possible.

¡Hoja!

This semester i finally started studying two very important languages. No, not Armenian and Irish – i’m talking about Spanish and Arabic.

Spanish is in huge demand. In fact, i’m still not officially signed up for the course. It is given in five different groups, each with its own days and hours, there’s only one that fits me and technically it is full, but the teacher agreed to accept me. This group has sixty students and it is only one of five. I’ll have to go through some more bureaucratic hoops to get an official grade too.

Our Spanish teacher gave us homework for yesterday. I didn’t do it, of course. No-one was really sure whether to hand it in. At the end of the lesson one female student asked loudly: “Do we have to hand in the homework?”, to which i immediately replied: “Shhhhhh!” Then someone told me quietly: “You should forgive her, she is an atudait.”

If you are not Israeli, this requires an explanation. Atudai (עתודאי, f. -it, pl. -im) is someone who is allowed to complete an academic degree before he is drafted to IDF service. So it means that she a). is a geek and b). hasn’t been in the army yet and hence she doesn’t know what a “kit bag question” is. In IDF slang, a “kit bag question” is a question better not asked, because the reply can be positive. It originates at a very common story – the commander tells the unit to run and some stupid soldier asks – “With the kit bag or without the kit bag?” The reply is obvious. This story is very famous, but when i was at tironut (boot camp) someone actually asked this exact question.

Another Hebrew saying goes: “Suckers never die.”

Calli

Look: Arabic-Chinese calligraphy and more Arabic-Chinese calligraphy.

Arabic calligraphy is so much more interesting than Hebrew, or any other for that matter. To my taste, Japanese comes second and Chinese third.

There hardly is such a thing as Hebrew calligraphy – the script for hand-written Torah scrolls is the same all the time and all the other books are just printed and we are not really concerned with handwritten calligraphy, which is a pity.

Vodka

This just in: Vodka goes very well with ice cream. Makes sense – it’s like a five dollar milkshake.

I’m writing a paper about languages of three peoples that have a long historical argument about the very hard question, “Who invented vodka?” I’m talking about Russian, Belarusian and Lithuanian. I may throw Polish in at some stage, too.