A straightforward, modern Hebrew rendition would be something like
זעמו של אלוהים יעניש את נשמתך
which, phonetically transcripted, reads:
Zaamo shel Elohim yaanish et nishmatkha
This, however, is almost soul-destroying in itself since, while it is technically correct, it has no rhyme or meter. What you need is something suitably biblical in tone and poetic in nature. I would go with something like:
תנאק נשמתך בחמת ה׳
Liron Lavi Turkenich is a young and engaging Israeli graphic designer with a commendable idea: bridge the cultural gap between Israel’s Hebrew speakers and its Arab population by creating a ‘hybrid’ font set comprising characters that are half Hebrew, half Arabic:
Fig. 1: A blend of the Hebrew and Arabic words for “language”, in the “Aravrit” font. Unfortunately, it looks nothing like the Arabic word, and most resembles the Hebrew word שנאה (sin’ah) = ‘hate’
I read briefly about this font (cleverly dubbed Aravrit—a play on the Hebrew words aravit and ivrit, i.e., ‘Arabic’ and ‘Hebrew’) a few months ago, and even adopted the first combined word that you see in the video (which allegedly depicts the word ‘language’ in both Hebrew and in Arabic) in my latest talk, about ‘Arabic Hebrew‘ (see Fig. 1).
Several Jewish biblical commentators weighed in on this same question.
Rashi’s explanation—‘Because the HOBBH [Holy One Blessed Be He] was alone in the world, because the angels were not created until these second day’—seems to leave us none the wiser.
The Ramban (Nachmanides)’s interpretation is more helpful: ‘One can’t say “first day”, since the second had not yet occurred, because “the first” [implies a series that already exists], whereas “one [day]” doesn’t.’
Shadal (Samuel David Luzzatto): ‘One day, [in the sense that] the evening and the morning [together] constituted one day […] i.e. a whole day.’ To put it another way: ‘God did all this within one day—more specifically, in one evening and morning, with time left over.’
Of those three, the latter sounds most plausible. But my personal take is that the real reason is poetical: Vaihi erev, vaihi boqer, yom eḥad sounds so much more lyrical than Vaihi erev, vaihi boqer, yom rishon.
(Originally written in reply to a question at Quora.com).
Broadly speaking, it’s fairly easy, as Italian uses the same vowels as in Hebrew (in fact, it’s a common way of explaining Hebrew vowels to English speakers). By default, the /a/ sound is assumed, and the /i/ sound is indicated by using a yod as though it were the letter i in Italian. If the vowel is an /e/, /o/ or /u/ sound, use niqqud to state a ségol, ḥolam, or shuruq, respectively. However:
Fascinating.
When I read this question, I was convinced that it’s about the word שיבה (pron. sheevah), which means “return”, and is key to the notion of return to Zion, which underpins Zionism and modern Israel.
There are many rules and exceptions on this point, which are founded on the notion that language rules can be formulated, like mathematics, on simple “If X, then Y” principles that always apply—such as, “If it ends with ah, then it must be feminine.”
But language is not like mathematics: the real determiner of any aspect of it (in any language) is what sounds right to native speakers and to anyone with an “ear” for the language. For example, the Hebrew word lailah (“night”) is masculine because lailah tov (“good night”) sounds OK, whereas lailah tovah sounds odd—and the reason for that is probably because all day-related terms, such as boqer (morning), yom (day), erev (evening) and even shavua (week) are masculine. So there is logic, but it is more subtle than a simplistic “If X, then Y.”
I don’t know if Israel counts as a “top country” in this regard, but it does have a problem with transliteration of Hebrew into English (or in Roman characters in general).
Essentially, the problem is one of what is known in information theory as information loss: in the process of converting from Hebrew to English, information about the spelling of words (including the distinctions between letters that are essentially homophonic, such as ḥet and khaf, tet and tav, kaf and quf, samekh and sin, etc.) is lost, so if you were to try and convert back to Hebrew, you wouldn’t be able to reconstitute the original spelling—even if you were a native Hebrew speaker and recognised the words, as in the following example, from a poem of homophones titled Modern-day Ecclesiastes:
