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  • From: yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: re:Ariyel's Flower
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 06:30:01 -0500


thank you, bryan, for some delightful innovation.
a flower will sprout and grow.

The grade, I hope, is superfluous.

Questions/comments on the text go in three general directions:
a. details of form, grammatical correctness
b. choice of vocabulary or construction, style.
c. translation/intended communication

I will label comments below with -a-, -b-, -c- to point out the type.

>1. (title) hatsitsah le'ariyel
-b- nice word, but tsits and peraH are more common.
[NB: plural tsitsim must be avoided because of Modern Hebrew slang for
women's breasts
(it comes via yiddish not BH).]
-b- ariyel is more a boy's name, though used for Jerusalem in Bible and is
also a cultic object. Today we use ariyela.
[This raises a continual problem, whether to push BH to where it probably
was, or could have gone (i.e. into the black holes of the language), or to
conform to later usage. Here, I would choose a different name that is
clearly feminine.]

>2. 'ariyel halak:t `al haderek
-a- halexa [a.k.a.:'halekah'] is best, or holexet
-b- badderex instead of `al hadderex.
-c- 'walker' is not good English. In Hebrew I would assume that the
storyteller is already telling us about one particular incident on one
particular day.

>3. vatishax lareyx 'et tsitsah
-a- lehariaH 'to smell'
-a- ha-tsitsah , article is necessary with et, and et is necessary for one
of the characters of the story.
on the other hand, lehariaH ha-tsitsah, without et but with 'ha-', is
possible for something marginal.
-c- (unless poetic 'she bent down at the smell of ... kafefa lereaH ...)
-b- shaH (qal) and nashaH (nif`al), are problematic, they are poetic for
being low, dishonored, in mourning.
for literal, try:
kare`a/vattixra` 'she crouched down', or
kafefa/kappa/vattaxof 'she bent over'.
another word, (possibly more literal than *sh-H-H ), and very rare in BH,
would be shaHeta/vattIshaH (vattishaH: accent on '-ti-', from li-shHot 'to
bend down' *sh-H-h ).
all the above is why we use le-hitkofef today. :-)

>4. vehineh hatsitsah dibar:t
-a- dibbera
-b- vehinne dibbera ha-peraH. vehinne with suffix verb strongly prefers
VS order, especially since the surprise is a completed event rather than an
on-going process.
-c- "And behold, it was the flower that was a speaker (X-qatal)" The flow
of the story would be the single event of speaking here. There is no focus
on flower as though distinguishing from among two assumed speakers.

>5. vato'mer
>6. boqer tob 'ariyel
-b- anachronistic, but nice. shalom lax, ariel-, yevarexex ha-shem.
of course, only encouragement here to the student. I let my students use
such modernisms as long as they know that boqer tov is 'our style' and not
BH. Jeremiah would have understood, --and disagreed :-)

>7. vatdaleg 'ariyel
-b- this is close according to attested BH (=ariyel jumped up and down,
back and forth'). A 'black hole' (missing word/idiom) probably exists here
for a single 'jump'. vattidlog would be better for 'to jump', or else
vattibbahel 'was confused', vattiddahem 'be startled, stunned', vatteHrad
'and she trembled, got scared'.

>8. vatits`aq
>9. vataber hatstitsah 'el 'ariyel le'mor
-a- a typo for vattedabber.

>10. 'al tir'i
>11. 'ani re`ak
>12. vato'mer 'aiyel
>13. 'otak 'abi' lebeyti
-b- good choice of syntax

>14. vatabi' 'ariyel 'et hatsitsah lebeytah.
>15. vatiqra' shemah. re`i

She is on her way to learning Hebrew.
yafe `asitem.

braxot
Randall Buth




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