Hebrew and Me Part One

All the Hebrew I knew when I came here was Shalom. I was trying to teach myself the alphabet, and I had perhaps a third of it down. But that was about it. Shalom and Alef through Vav. Well, Lamed, too. Lamed was easy to remember. Shin, too. But I was clueless with everything else. The text was indecipherable, and it all sounded like throat-clearing noise when I heard it spoken.

Now, a year and a half later, I’m still pretty lost when it comes to Hebrew, but I’m slightly less lost. I know the alphabet now—although I still have a hard time putting the letters in alphabetical order. If someone out there knows the Hebrew equivalent to the alphabet song, send it to me.

I still can’t read Hebrew worth crap—save for the easy Hebrew newspaper, and then only a few words at a time—and it still sounds a lot like throat-clearing noise when I hear it, although now I can pick out a word or phrase here and there. If someone asks me for a cigarette or a light—or the time even—I can respond. I can order my coffee now in Hebrew, and when I do, I get Hebrew back. That’s supposed to be a good sign that your Hebrew pronunciation is good. If you get English back, or a weird look, then you screwed it up. My wife whose Hebrew is far better than mine, usually gets Hebrew spoken back to her, but she has had her moments. She once made the mistake when she was ordering coffee of transposing the last two letters of the Hebrew word for milk. If you do that, you’re saying pity, not milk. She ordered coffee with pity.

Because she always wants pity with her coffee. Don’t you? The pitiable coffee.

Anyhow that is nothing compared to the potential embarrassment I’ll face if I mix up the word for cup with the word for a certain part of the female anatomy. You know which one I’m talking about. The one down below. And it’s the vulgar word, too. The really really bad one for it. Four letters. In Hebrew it’s three, and it’s just a matter of saying the wrong vowel (and don’t get me started about the lack of printed vowels in Hebrew; that’s a whole other entry). So far I’ve only flubbed it in front of my wife in the privacy of our home and fortunately, not in a public place.

Can I have a c*&! , please? Yikes.

Homina, homina, homina, homina, homina. I should introduce that expression to Israelis.

Homina, homina, homina, homina, homina. Ed Norton goes to Israel. Actually I would like to introduce a lot of expressions to Israelis. I bet I know a lot they don’t know.

As always, more to come.

P.S. About the throat-clearing noise. As you may know, Hebrew pronunciation uses a certain sound fairly liberally. The throat-clearing one. In linguistics it’s called the dorsal velar fricative.

Dorsal velar fricative. Oooohhhh. I know these things.

There are even two letters for it in Hebrew. Not just one, but two. Khaf and Khet. Or is it Chaf and Chet? Doesn’t matter I suppose. But I mentioned this to one of our Israeli friends. I said something about the necessary amount of phlegm that the average Hebrew speaker needs, and she laughed. But she did agree, although perhaps with a degree of self-degradation. If I made her a little self-conscious of her language, I apologize.