Thursday, June 10, 2004
Some Poetry
I recently discovered a very cool site, Seforim Online. Downloads are a little slow, but they have lots of excellent stuff. I've been reading and enjoying some of Abraham Ibn Ezra's poems. Look at this little gem:
אִלּוּ לְפִי אֵידִי דְּמָעַי יִזְלוּן
לֹא דָרְכָה רֶגֶל אֱנוֹשׁ יַבֶּשֶׁת,
אַךְ לֹא לְמֵי נֹח לְבַד כֹּרַת בְּרִית,
כִּי גַם לְדִמְעִי נִרְאֲתָה הַקֶּשֶׁת.
Or this question and answer, each one a perfect palindrome that reads more naturally than any palindrome I have seen in any language
אבי אל חי שמך למה מלך משיח לא יבא?
דעו מאביכם כי לא בוש אבוש, שוב אשוב אליכם כי בא מועד.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Qamats and Segol are now endangered species.
I am still in shock from this article, maybe because I have never accepted the concept of the "Academy of the Hebrew language" as dictators of what is or isn't correct Hebrew. And my confidence is hardly increased when that last link doesn't work for me and I have to root out the original article from Google cache.
However, my chief astonishment comes from the confident statement that Tsere and Segol are pronounced the same. It just goes to show that native speakers of a language are simply unaware of many of the distinctions that they themselves make when speaking it. Now I come to think of it, I was never aware that the two "l"s in "little" are prononounced differently in English, until someone pointed it out to me.
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