If you give an עכבר a كعكة

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cjareck
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby cjareck » Sun Nov 01, 2020 7:51 pm

Deinonysus wrote:To Have

The Hebrew and Arabic ways of saying "to have" work similarly, although they use different words to do it.

"I have a house" in Hebrew:
יש לי בית
Yesh li báyit
Literally "there is to me a house". The preposition ל meaning "to" is inflected for the first person singular.

"I have a house" in Arabic:
عندي بيت
ʿindī bayt

What is extremely interesting for me, in Russian you have a similar construction to Hebrew one.
У меня есть = "I have"
U menya yest
The first and third part of the phrase doesn't change. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence since both languages are not related.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Nov 02, 2020 5:05 pm

cjareck wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:To Have

The Hebrew and Arabic ways of saying "to have" work similarly, although they use different words to do it.

"I have a house" in Hebrew:
יש לי בית
Yesh li báyit
Literally "there is to me a house". The preposition ל meaning "to" is inflected for the first person singular.

"I have a house" in Arabic:
عندي بيت
ʿindī bayt

What is extremely interesting for me, in Russian you have a similar construction to Hebrew one.
У меня есть = "I have"
U menya yest
The first and third part of the phrase doesn't change. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence since both languages are not related.

Very interesting! It probably is just a coincidence. WALS lists five different ways handling predicative possession and they are all about equally common. A "have-possessive" like English uses is the most common at 63 out of the 240 surveyed languages, but a "locational possessive" like Arabic and Russian use is also quite common, at 48 languages.

https://wals.info/chapter/117
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby cjareck » Mon Nov 02, 2020 5:54 pm

Thanks for the research! I didn't know that such a website like WALS exists, and it looks exciting!
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby ilmari » Tue Nov 03, 2020 10:57 am

What is extremely interesting for me, in Russian you have a similar construction to Hebrew one.
У меня есть = "I have"
U menya yest
The first and third part of the phrase doesn't change. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence since both languages are not related.


There are quite a few expressions in modern Hebrew that are similar to Russian (or other Slavic languages), and it is no coincidence – as modern Hebrew was revived by people who spoke Slavic languages (and Yiddish). I haven't a full list in my mind, but one example I can think of is הכל בסדר всё в порядке "everything is OK". I also suspect that the verb לשבת "to sit" is used in a similar manner as the Russian сидеть in expression like לשבת בבית "to stay at home" or לשבת בבית הסהר "to stay in prison".
As for יש לי у меня есть, I am not really sure, but I have the feeling יש לי is neither very biblical nor talmudic. It may very well be also a Slavic borrowing - but I don't know...

Another odd similarity, but this one may really be a coincidence: modern Hebrew present tense looks like the Russian past tense. Both tenses behave like adjectives. The Russian past has four forms - masculine sg, feminine sg, neuter sg, plural. And the Hebrew present has also four forms: masculine and feminine sg, masculine and feminine pl. Interesting, isn't it?
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby AroAro » Tue Nov 03, 2020 11:28 am

ilmari wrote:
What is extremely interesting for me, in Russian you have a similar construction to Hebrew one.
У меня есть = "I have"
U menya yest
The first and third part of the phrase doesn't change. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence since both languages are not related.


There are quite a few expressions in modern Hebrew that are similar to Russian (or other Slavic languages), and it is no coincidence – as modern Hebrew was revived by people who spoke Slavic languages (and Yiddish). I haven't a full list in my mind, but one example I can think of is הכל בסדר всё в порядке "everything is OK". I also suspect that the verb לשבת "to sit" is used in a similar manner as the Russian сидеть in expression like לשבת בבית "to stay at home" or לשבת בבית הסהר "to stay in prison".
As for יש לי у меня есть, I am not really sure, but I have the feeling יש לי is neither very biblical nor talmudic. It may very well be also a Slavic borrowing - but I don't know...

Another odd similarity, but this one may really be a coincidence: modern Hebrew present tense looks like the Russian past tense. Both tenses behave like adjectives. The Russian past has four forms - masculine sg, feminine sg, neuter sg, plural. And the Hebrew present has also four forms: masculine and feminine sg, masculine and feminine pl. Interesting, isn't it?


That's an interesting issue, but as Deinonysus said before, locational possessive constructions are equally common among world languages so that's probably not a Slavic borrowing but just a coincidence. Russian is the only Slavic language that does not use the verb "to have" to express possession. According to some linguistic theories, Russian borrowed the construction "у меня есть" from Uralic languages that were spoken in most of North-Eastern Europe before Slavic expansion.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby cjareck » Tue Nov 03, 2020 11:39 am

ilmari wrote:There are quite a few expressions in modern Hebrew that are similar to Russian (or other Slavic languages), and it is no coincidence – as modern Hebrew was revived by people who spoke Slavic languages (and Yiddish). I haven't a full list in my mind, but one example I can think of is הכל בסדר всё в порядке "everything is OK". I also suspect that the verb לשבת "to sit" is used in a similar manner as the Russian сидеть in expression like לשבת בבית "to stay at home" or לשבת בבית הסהר "to stay in prison".

Well, those expressions are also common in Polish:
הכל בסדר всё в порядке "everything is OK" - "wszystko w porządku"
לשבת בבית "to stay at home" - "siedzieć w domu"
לשבת בבית הסהר "to stay in prison". - "siedzieć w więzieniu"
They could come to Polish from Russian, but don't know their origin.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Nov 03, 2020 1:43 pm

ilmari wrote:
What is extremely interesting for me, in Russian you have a similar construction to Hebrew one.
У меня есть = "I have"
U menya yest
The first and third part of the phrase doesn't change. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence since both languages are not related.


There are quite a few expressions in modern Hebrew that are similar to Russian (or other Slavic languages), and it is no coincidence – as modern Hebrew was revived by people who spoke Slavic languages (and Yiddish). I haven't a full list in my mind, but one example I can think of is הכל בסדר всё в порядке "everything is OK". I also suspect that the verb לשבת "to sit" is used in a similar manner as the Russian сидеть in expression like לשבת בבית "to stay at home" or לשבת בבית הסהר "to stay in prison".
As for יש לי у меня есть, I am not really sure, but I have the feeling יש לי is neither very biblical nor talmudic. It may very well be also a Slavic borrowing - but I don't know...

Another odd similarity, but this one may really be a coincidence: modern Hebrew present tense looks like the Russian past tense. Both tenses behave like adjectives. The Russian past has four forms - masculine sg, feminine sg, neuter sg, plural. And the Hebrew present has also four forms: masculine and feminine sg, masculine and feminine pl. Interesting, isn't it?

Thanks for posting, those are some very interesting theories!

I unfortunately don't have my main Biblical Hebrew textbook with me, but I started looking through the Bible and I was able to find an example of the יש־לי (yesh-li) construction in the Bible. It is used in Ruth 1:12:
יֶשׁ-לִי תִקְוָה
yeš-li ṯiqwɔ (Biblical pronunciation)
yesh-li tikvá (Modern pronunciation)
"I have hope"

So that construction is definitely not borrowed from Russian!

According to Wiktionary, that use of בסדר (beséder) is likely a calque from the German „alles in Ordnung“, so whether it's from German, Russian, or another language, it seems to be a European borrowing. That's pretty cool, I didn't know that!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%91%D7%A1%D7%93%D7%A8

The definition of ישב (yɔšav (Biblical), yasháv (Modern)) that I remember from my Biblical Hebrew book is "sit, settle, reside". So it could be used in the context of living somewhere, but maybe the meaning of "stay" is a European influence.

If I recall correctly, most Biblical Hebrew didn't have any tenses at all, it had a perfective and imperfective aspect. But by late Biblical Hebrew, due to the influence of Aramaic, the aspect system was replaced with a tense system where the imperfective conjugation became the future tense and the perfective conjugation became the past tense. And what became the present tense was actually the active participle, which is why it behaves like an adjective rather than a verb. So this change happened very long before the creation of Modern Hebrew and was not influenced by Russian.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Neurotip » Wed Nov 04, 2020 7:59 am

(I'm a few posts behind...)

Oh gosh, when I said 'Arabic calligraphy', I meant just writing nicely (να γράφω καλά), not the amazing art-writing constructions - I love those too, but that would be a lifetime's study for sure.

Deinonysus wrote:Like many little girls, my daughter is obsessed with Frozen. She has a little Elsa doll and she'll hold her up and say "yaago yaago!" She's 21 months old so that's how she says "Let it go". Since we're always singing it to her, I figured I would buy the sheet music for Frozen and learn the piano accompaniment as well.

I flipped to the end of the book and saw that there seemed to be a song in Icelandic. I understood several of the words. Then I saw that they didn't write the Icelandic noun ending "ur", they wrote it without the "u", which is a dead giveaway that it was Old Norse, not Icelandic!

As an aside, the Old Norse fits together almost word for word with the English translation. You couldn't do that with German! I've always thought English syntax is very Scandinavian, very different from the other West Germanic languages!


So cute! In the Icelandic dub of Frozen, they translate 'Let it go' as 'That's enough', 'Þetta er nóg', which struck me as odd until I realised that it sounds very similar to 'Let it go'...

I agree, for all Ísl's uncompromising inflections, it is very much a cousin of English - particularly the English of Scotland and northern England. I noticed recently that you could sing the song 'When the boat comes in' in Icelandic using almost entirely cognate words (þú skalt hafa fisk í litlum diski) - unidiomatic, admittedly, but it makes the point.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby ilmari » Wed Nov 04, 2020 12:48 pm

If I recall correctly, most Biblical Hebrew didn't have any tenses at all, it had a perfective and imperfective aspect. But by late Biblical Hebrew, due to the influence of Aramaic, the aspect system was replaced with a tense system where the imperfective conjugation became the future tense and the perfective conjugation became the past tense. And what became the present tense was actually the active participle, which is why it behaves like an adjective rather than a verb. So this change happened very long before the creation of Modern Hebrew and was not influenced by Russian.


Of course! The similarity here is totally accidental.

But beyond the specific examples I gave - which may have been better chosen - I just tried to emphasize the fact that modern Hebrew was much influenced by European languages, first of all Yiddish, and then Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian. etc.). This is just something to keep in mind when studying Hebrew.

The linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann goes as far as to say that modern Hebrew is not Hebrew anymore, but a new language he calls Israeli. In my opinion, he is going too far. After all, if you are literate in modern Hebrew, you can understand pretty well biblical or mishnaic Hebrew; the languages are not so far apart. But Zuckermann is right in stressing the European element present in modern Hebrew, I think.
http://languagehat.com/hebrew-or-israeli/
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3333948,00.html
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby ilmari » Wed Nov 04, 2020 12:55 pm

Russian is the only Slavic language that does not use the verb "to have" to express possession. According to some linguistic theories, Russian borrowed the construction "у меня есть" from Uralic languages that were spoken in most of North-Eastern Europe before Slavic expansion.


You are right! In Polish there is a verb for "to have" (mieć), while the Russian у меня есть is similar to the Finnish "minulla on".
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