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%A8The 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.