December 04, 2017
Tim, actually thinking this over, I may have given you a bad translation of "Do you have a light (for a cigarette)?"
"Yesh aish?" May mean all three words of the English "Is there fire?" but that is still two words less than the five word English phrase above and the Hebrew never specifically bothers to say that one person is being asked by another person for a light or fire. But the general principle still holds up, namely that Hebrew is much more concise than English. This becomes difficult to explain because Hebrew does not have the verb "to be" and has a number of work-arounds for that missing practical verb.
2c from Dana Mathewson
Makes you understand why Yiddish came into being, doesn't it?
2d A reply to Dana (about Yiddish)
Actually, Yiddish came into being because Jews were living in Central Europe and spoke the local languages every day, only using Hebrew only for prayer, as the considered Hebrew holy. Yiddish is something like 300-400 year old German mixed with some Hebrew and Polish ("zhlob" meaning "a lout") and other words and written in the Hebrew alphabet. The Yiddish word for furniture is "maybel" also is almost identical to the Spanish word for the same thing (mueble).
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:41 AM
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