chronic.linguist

And it was written on the whiteboard outside my room:

Hail, Citizen:
And your mother spread her legs, and there was light.

Naturally, I felt compelled to translate this into Biblical Hebrew:

ותפתח אמך את-רגליה, ויהי-אור.

If I end up taking Biblical Hebrew next Fall, that will shed light on how accurate this translation is.

I had a stroke of genius¹ on the bus ride home today. I realized: If I had a blog about Hebrew fonts/typography, I could call it…drumroll please…Serifim.

Unfortunately, this epiphany was in vain as I have no content for such a blog, except to say that David is my font of choice when typing in Hebrew. However, I was happy to find that someone who does know something about the subject has stepped up to the plate.

Naturally, thinking about serifs got me wondering where the word came from, and lexicographers seem at a loss to answer that question confidently. American Heritage posits “Perhaps from Dutch schreef, line, from Middle Dutch scērve, from scriven, to write, from Latin scrībere”; the OED simply says “Of obscure origin,” quoting from an 1841 printing dictionary as its earliest source with the term.

Unsurprisingly, in Hebrew it’s סריף [seʁif]. (Seraph, on the other hand, is שרף [saʁaf].)

Finally, I need to work on this habit of introducing every sentence with an adverb. :-/

While browsing the New Books section of the library, I stumbled upon—what else?—a linguistics book. Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention is a fascinating account of how the evolution of complex structures in language can be explained using just a few very basic principles of language change. The first several chapters explain these principles with wonderful illustrations from a diverse set of languages, ranging from Akan to Akkadian to English. (Ever wonder how Proto-Indo-European dont became tooth in English? The answer lies in the famous sound change known as Grimm’s Law.) Since I’ve saved my Historical Linguistics class for next semester, many of these concepts were new to me, and I think Deutscher does an excellent job of elucidating each of them.

One of the coolest aspects of this book is that while it touches on some of the coolest features studied by linguists, it does not assume prior familiarity with linguistics. So all you non-linguists need to read it as well —it’ll give you an appreciation for how we all make use of such a complex and varied phenomenon.

If you’re interested, I’ve written summaries of the chapters in more detail:
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In class last week we read a review from a Hebrew newspaper of a book about common Israeli spices. “סיפורי תבלין” (Spice Stories) delves into the history and folklore of each plant—noting, for example, that the Egyptians believed that eating coriander would cause them to give birth to sons. So for our writing assignment on the mythology or folklore behind a plant, I wrote about the mandrake in the world of Harry Potter. Little did I know that my professor would come back the next day with a passage from the Bible (Genesis 30:14-16) which suggests that the mandrake was prized among our foremothers. So much so that they led to the birth of Isaachar. Mandrakes are also intertwined with sensual imagery in Song of Songs: “The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates [are] all manner of pleasant [fruits], new and old, [which] I have laid up for thee, O my beloved” (7:13). The Wikipedia article claims that the Hebrew word means “love plant”—indeed, דוד (from which דודא probably derives) means “lover.” Perhaps J.K. Rowling would have been better advised to plant (har) the Mandrake in Half-Blood Prince .

Today I began listening to the CD we were given in Hebrew class featuring folkloric tales. The man reading the stories is of a curious dialect—or so I thought, until I checked the IPA Handbook’s entry for Hebrew. Unlike my teacher and most Israelis, he speaks with what the Handbook terms the Oriental pronunciation, “usually spoken by people with a Near Eastern origin, who have some sort of Arabic or Aramaic in their own or their parents’ backround. These speakers may have been born in Israel, and by now most of them do not know any Arabic or Aramaic.” The two sounds that immediately alerted me to his dialect:

• He pronounces /ch/ (ח) as the voiceless pharyngeal fricative [ħ]. I thought the typical pronunciation was [x], but the IPA Handbook lists [χ].
• He pronounces /r/ (ר) as [r]; most Israelis, I believe, use the uvular fricative [ʁ] (or sometimes the uvular trill [ʀ]). For whatever reason, the IPA Handbook lists [r] for both dialects.

Update (May 30, 2006): Added link above to the website for the Handbook, which provides the audio to the examples given in the text. This audio clearly corresponds to their transcriptions—in contrast to the pronunciations of my two Hebrew professors, what I’ve heard of Israeli TV/radio, and Wikipedia’s description—so my guess is that the pronunciation of the speaker chosen for the Handbook isn’t representative of Standard Hebrew as it is most widely spoken today. If you have no idea what the IPA or all these crazy symbols are, Wikipedia is your friend.