[A2A] One would use a calque (a.k.a. loan translation) when there is no equivalent word or expression in the target language, but it captures the meaning so well and concisely that it is recreated in the target language by emulating the same word combination with native words.
In Hebrew, noted examples are:
Continue readingBy ‘us’ I’m assuming you mean the Jewish people, and specifically those living in Israel today.
You can’t cherry-pick God’s promises. Even if you accept those verses at face value, the promise is contingent upon the nation remaining faithful to God’s commandments. In the Book of Deuteronomy (chap. 28), God warns Moses:
Continue readingPretty much—since the modern Hebrew cursive (MHC) is based on the Ashkenazi cursive style that began to emerge in the 18th century, or thereabouts.
Here’s a fairly typical example of Yiddish handwriting:
Three reasons:
There is a Hebrew version of Scrabble, because Hebrew has an alphabet (shucks—who do you think invented it?).
However, the Hebrew version is not always readily available—especially when one is abroad (i.e., outside Israel). For those situations (as in many others), SimHebrew (simulated Hebrew) comes in handy, as evident from this example of a Hebrew Scrabble game that we played in the family:
Misapprehensions like this are precisely why conventional transliteration of Hebrew is so flawed.
In SimHebrew (simulated Hebrew in Latin characters), the spelling distinctions between those three words are clear, and preserved:
See Modern-day Ecclesiastes for more examples.
‘The Fonts Project’ פרויקט הפונטים is one go-to site that I use: a diverse range of fonts, and the ability to simulate a short text of your own:
This urban legend has been making the rounds for years in relation to the logo of a certain energy drink whose logo is three claw marks that supposedly look like the Hebrew letter vav, which also has the numerical value of 6—i.e., ‘666’
The problem is, vav is very length-specific: it goes down to the baseline, but no more. Since the middle claw mark is longer than the other two, it suggests that it is the end-of-word form of a different Hebrew letter (nun = n), whose numerical value is 50—so technically, the numbers are 6–50–6. Not so Beastly.
Last but not least, numerical values above 100 using Hebrew letters don’t work like decimal numbers. To write the number 666 with Hebrew letters, one would write תרס”ו (tav-resh-samekh-vav), which numerically is 400+200+60+6, and would be read phonetically Tarsu™—which doesn’t mean anything, but I’ve trademarked it, anyway, to sell to a company with a devilishly good drink.
Actually, no. The Book of Deuteronomy is very explicit on the issue, with the expression avor et-hayarden el-ha’aretz asher Adonai eloheinu noten (‘pass the [River] Jordan to the land which the Lord our God has given’) repeated (in various permutations) a dozen times (2:29 / 3:27 / 4:21, 23, 26 / 9:1 / 11:31 / 12:10 / 27:2,4, 12 / 30:18).
Continue readingMy favourite so far is לֹא אָבָה יַבְּמִי – lo avah yabmi (Deut. 25:9)—meaning ‘He will not perform the duty of my husband’s brother’—which is the official complaint of a childless widow whose brother-in-law refuses to do his fraternal duty of giving her a child after the husband has died.
The expression is unfamiliar because the word yabmi is a conjugation of a curious verb— לִבְּמוֹת libmot — which is awkward to pronounce, not used in other contexts, and even the word for husband’s brother (יבם yavam), is unfamiliar today (in modern Hebrew, it is גיס gis, and can refer to the wife’s brother, as well).
I also love the description of the consequences of such a refusal:
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Notes by Autumn Light 