[Multilingual Monday] "Shel" Shock

[aadroma]

Modern Israeli Hebrew is a curious creature, to be certain. Simplified and "purified" by a Russian, it is the only example of a successfully revived language. That being said, the changes made move it further from Semitic languages and closer to Western languages, and these changes have made a few people in the linguistics field even question the

Comments

[muckefuck]

Modern Turkish, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any purely analytical forms. At least, if there's another way to say "the king's house" besides kralın evi (king-GEN house-3S.POSS), I don't know what it would be.

[wiped]

ottoman turkish also used the persian ezafe, so that "kralın evi" could also be rendered as "ev-i kral" (though a more likely rendering would be "hâne-i şah" as the 'öz türkçe' elements were generally replaced with persian or arabic words in such constructions). many of these forms remain fossilized in today's turkish, though AFAIK it's not very productive anymore.

[gullinbursti]

I'm so used to the construct form (and the full form of 'asher) that the she- form always makes me do a double-take when trying to read MH. I'm sure I'd get in the habit if I read more MH, but it seems like cheating to me somehow. ;)

(I thought I had Hebrew support enabled on this machine but I guess I don't!)

[bygbrat]

what's interesting about modern hebrew is that people who learned hebrew in the 40's, 50's and 60's have an incredibly hard time understanding what modern israeli teenagers are saying. technology and i think music has had such a big impact on culture and language all over the world that we are experiencing a huge communication gap between the generations.

[wiped]

urdu is interesting in that it has three different ways of forming the genitive: one indigenous, one from persian, and one from arabic. thus "the house of the king" could be rendered three ways: شاه کا گهر shâh kâ ghar (indigenous), خانه شاه khâna-e shâh (persian), or بیت الملک beyt ol-malek (arabic). as with the turkish example i cited above, urdu often (though not always) changes its vocabulary to match the language of the grammatical construct it uses, hence the three different words for 'house' (ghar, khâna, beyt).

btw you have a typo in your arabic, you wrote بيت الملك as بطت الملك .

[aadroma]

I'm not at all shocked by Urdu featuring this since at least part of this carries into Hindi as well (I know I've seen खान ए in print before!!).

I fixed the typo; danke!

[donncha22]

Didn't "shel" enter Hebrew from Aramaic during the Mishnaic period? That seems to give it a Semitic pedigree at any rate.