Talk:Modern Hebrew grammar/Archive 2

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Genitive case or construct state?

Based on what I've read elsewhere, I think this is inaccurate or at least nonstandard in its terminology:

Hebrew's genitive case is achieved by placing two nouns next to each other.

Isn't the construct state in Hebrew (and Arabic) a kind of definiteness marking, not a case? And since the head word rather than the dependent is marked, it's distinct from the genitive case of Latin, Greek, etc. So maybe it should read:

Hebrew does not have a genitive case, as in Latin (where the possessor is marked), but rather shows possession by marking the possessed noun as being in the construct state. .........

Someone who actually knows Hebrew should vet this before it goes in the article though... --Jim Henry 13:07, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Your understanding is mostly correct. From what I understand of Arabic, a noun is marked for case as well as for state (definite/indefinite/construct); so you might have [noun-accusative-construct] [noun-genitive-definite]. (A noun in the construct state always appears with a noun in the genitive case and vice versa.) But that's Arabic; Hebrew, by contrast, doesn't have case markings, so the first noun's being in the construct state is what makes it clear that the second noun is acting as a possessor. (For that matter, Hebrew doesn't mark the indefinite state, and marks the construct state for only about half of nouns, so it's often the mere juxtaposition of two nouns that makes it clear that the first is in the construct state and the second would be in the genitive case if Hebrew marked cases.)

So, you have the right idea, though I'd quibble with your statement that Hebrew doesn't have a genitive case; I think it would be more accurate to say that it doesn't mark nouns for a genitive case. (The genitive case is a feature of language in general; different languages mark it differently, using any combination of morphology, word order, adpositions, and adpositional clitics.) Also, it really must be made clear that the two nouns are juxtaposed, with the possessor following the possessed, as I think that's really the key factor; I think that if someone is trying to say "the man's house", then ha-bayit ha-ish would be understandable if confusing, even though ha-bayit is completely the wrong form (or shel is missing), but ha-ish beit is really not, even though beit is the correct form. Maybe not everyone would agree, though.

Ruakh 15:59, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Responding to the last paragraph in the previous post - I think that using the analogy of the English word "of" solves this problem. In English, like in Hebrew, when using the "of" construct the possessor follows the possessed. It is not at all as complicated as it may appear to be - using the construct state in a situation like this: [posessed(construct)][possessor], the meaning is clear by considering and implied "of" between the two. In fact, it is not merely an analogy, but is in fact more or less true, since the word "shel" in Hebrew essentially means "of". So I don't think that saying "ha-ish beit" is really a possibility for someone who knows this relationship.

And by the way, Modern Hebrew commonly uses the construct state in order to describe direct relationships and sometimes compound nouns with a single meaning (such as "beit-sefer", which means "school"), but it RARELY uses the construct to indicate possession or a very simple relationship. To indicate possession, which is technically a more specific example of the more general genitive case, we use "shel" almost exclusively. To say "the man's house", a Hebrew speaker would use "ha-bait shel ha-ish" almost in all situations, unless there is some kind of idiomatic expression involved. --EngineeringCat 05:20, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're responding to; what is "this problem" that you refer to in your first sentence? While I agree with all your specific points (except that I don't know what you mean by "direct relationships"), I really don't see what your overall point is. Ruakh 11:47, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I think I misunderstood "it really must be made clear that the two nouns are juxtaposed", thinking that you think it has to be made clear in the article, rather than to the reader of your comment. So I was merely pointing out the easiest way to visualize this is by considering the word "of" (implied or otherwise), in which case there is no need to carefully explain and remember the possessor follows the possessed and of course using the erroroneous combinations you presented in your examples. Anyway, I just misunderstood that comment.--EngineeringCat 03:24, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I did mean that it needs to be made clear in the article, but I don't think it's any particular problem; it can just be stated normally. (If my wording — "it really must be made clear that [...]" — seems overly strong, it's simply because the current text does make it clear, and the proposed text didn't say it at all, and I wanted to emphasize that it's a key point that can't be overlooked in any rewrite. Sorry about the confusion!) Ruakh 22:25, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

I apologize for dredging this issue up, but the section on constructs uses accurate examples now but the explanation is still confusing. It says the genitive case is expressed through constructs, and then explains that possession is not. In other languages, wouldn't the genitive be used to explain possession?

Can we say that the construct is (usually) used to create compound nouns and של is used to indicate possession, as EngineeringCat says? You know, until he mentioned it, I wouldn't have noticed, but he's right that in this way Hebrew has actually sort of come to resemble English. You'd say "soccer game," "parking spot," and "travel agent" just like you'd say משחק כדורגל, מקום חנייה, סוכן נסיעות. But I think you might get a smile if you asked for a סוכן של נסיעות. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.

There's also the use of the construct in adjectives, which is also usually kind of high style but I think I could describe someone as טוב–לב or a drink as נטול–קופאין without sounding like a pedant. Again, if I am wrong, I apologize.Mlevie 04:40, 30 October 2007 (UTC)ּּּּ

Etymology of Ha

Hello all. I'm working on an Arabic grammar-related article, and a question has come up there about the etymology of the definite articles in the Semitic languages. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks! -Fsotrain09 17:11, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I think the most widely accepted explanation is some proto-Semitic language had a demonstrative determiner pronounced *hal (possibly with different forms, such as *han, depending on the noun's gender and/or number), which evolved in prehistoric times into the Hebrew ha-, the Arabic al-, and the definite articles in at least some other Semitic languages. Ruakh 18:46, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, are there any Semitic languages which preserve the (presumed) proto-Semitic *hal? Mo-Al 02:29, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I can't say for sure — I'm not an expert or anything — but I'm assuming not, because I'm assuming that if there were, then people would mention it when they discuss *hal. I've seen *hal discussed in multiple places, with various explanations and justifications, and I've never seen someone mention "and such-and-such language even still has hal". But again, I really can't say for sure. Ruakh 04:18, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Does anybody know if Hebrew hal enjoys a connection with the Latin demonstrative pronoun hic, haec, hoc? In proto-Latin, the attachment of the enclitic suffix -ce (as is found in such words as hisce, huc, illuc and so on) to the root syllable ha makes it look like the roots were in common. 198.177.27.26 23:34, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language, while Latin is an Indo-European one; while there might be some genetic relationship between the two families, they split so long ago that no one's been able to demonstrate this relationship, and seems pretty clear that no relationship between them can be demonstrated with current techniques. As such, it's really hard for me to believe that Latin and Hebrew could have inherited their demonstratives from a recognizably common source. Now, this doesn't rule out the possibility of a loanword, but from what I understand, borrowing of basic grammatical words is fairly rare. Also, I don't think the proto-Latins would have had any contact with contemporary Semitic peoples, though I'm really not sure. —Ruakh_TALK 01:23, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The arise of the Greek definite article ho and ha seems to be a matter of concern too, even if the Greek alphabet tends to obscure the connection by employing the rough-breathing character for the letter h. Although you say that the two languages belong to two different language families, and I would certainly agree about that, this is more a matter of putting the horse before the cart, than making a specific conclusion based on the facts at hand. Are there any other Afro-asiatic languages that use a demonstrative pronoun that sounds like han ? Or is this a peculiarity unique to Hebrew? 198.177.27.12 23:07, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

One verb = one shoresh, or one binyan of one shoresh?

The article currently has each shoresh as corresponding to one verb, and views the different binyanim as different voices of the same verb. That's a valid way to look at it, but there's another way as well: each binyan of a shoresh corresponds to one verb, and a shoresh produces a group of up to seven verbs that are related in meaning but differ in implicit valency and voice, and verbs in certain binyanim tend to have certain relationships to other verbs with the same shoresh. I think the latter way is a more helpful way to present it to an English speaker, since in English the voice relationship is much more rigid and consistent (A does B → B is done [by A]). Further, English has some parallels to Hebrew's binyan system — consider to sit and to seat (lashevet and l'hashiv) — and in the English parallels, the two forms are considered separate verbs. (To be sure, there are many cases where an individual English verb can have different implicit valencies or voices — consider to open, where the door opened has a similar meaning to the door was opened [by someone] — but in these cases, there's no change in form analogous to that in Hebrew.)

So, does anyone object to my rewording parts of the article to change from the one-verb-equals-one-shoresh approach to the one-verb-equals-one-binyan-of-one-shoresh approach?

Ruakh 14:45, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll take that as a "No, no one objects." Ruakh 21:13, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with your interpretation. Different binyanim form verbs of different meaning, whether or not they're related by subject matter – and sometimes barely are at all (e.g. לספור and לספר). I think by most linguistic understandings each one would be a separate verb, considering that more than voice changes between them... e.g. both pa'al and pi'el verbs are almost always in the active voice (e.g. לחשוב and לחשב). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by J21 (talk • contribs) .

Thanks for the reässurance. :-) Ruakh 04:27, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

All these subsections

At this point, I think there are too many subpages. You have to click separately for every separate subtopic, none of which is all that big. I find that a bit tiresome. IMO, this was better when it is was all one article. The table of contents made it sufficiently navigable. The article length guidelines are only guidelines; I move for reintegration. --Judah

I'm confused by your comment; I only see one subpage, Hebrew verb conjugation, which first of all is not all that short (on my computer, it's almost four screen-lengths long), and second of all is only a start — a lot more needs to be added. Are there any other subpages, or are you saying that one subpage is too many? Ruakh 11:55, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

D'oh. That was a stupid comment I made. I just glanced at the page, saw verb conjugations was a new subpage, and that you had mentioned on the featured-article-nomination page that you were thinking of shortening the main article by changing it to summaries and subsections, and I just stupidly assumed that you had done that to all categories. My mistake.

It's true that the verb page is long in screenwidth, but that's almost all from charts--contentwise, it's pretty small, at least as it is now. I would still prefer not to separate it from the main article, but I don't guess I'll fight you over it. --Judah

You're right that it's content-light, but I see that as an argument for separating it — it lengthens the article significantly while adding relative little information. Ruakh 15:25, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Transliteration

It appears that this article has its own transliteration system. It would make more sense to just use the standard here - Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Hebrew) - wouldn't it? Mo-Al 00:00, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

First of all, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) is only about article titles, and the article on Hebrew grammar might benefit from a more precise transliteration scheme than that (e.g. we might consider it important to distinguish hei from khet, especially since hei is used in marking for definiteness and in various parts of various binyanim, even though Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) is currently leaning toward transcribing both as h). Further, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) will almost certainly end up recommending that words with common English spellings (Torah, Hanukkah, Akko or Acre) use those spellings, even when this conflicts with the general rules (which would probably produce tora, hanuka or hhanuka, and ako); in this article, since we give transliterations and translations side-by-side, it would make sense to follow the general rules in the transliterations and to use the common English spellings only in the translations.

Second of all, we want readers to be able to see what transliteration scheme we're using (since otherwise they'll have to guess at what our transliterations mean), and to do that, we need to explain it somewhere within the article, or in another article in the main namespace (such as Hebrew language). We can't link to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew), because it's a project page, and therefore not necessarily (or ever?) included in mirror sites.

And third of all, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) isn't a standard yet; it's a work in progress. So, even if we end up deciding to use it for this article's transliteration scheme once it's become an official policy, we still need to have some convention to use until then.

Ruakh 03:35, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I quote: "This page is designed to create an official policy regarding the translation of Hebrew and Israeli names and Hebrew transliteration for Wikipedia articles. " It seems inconsistent to use a different transliteration scheme for every article on Hebrew. There are policies on how to format pages; I don't see how this is different. I agree with some of what you've said, but there has to be some standard. Mo-Al 03:43, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, you're right. I think that's a mistake that should be fixed, though, as there are plenty of reasons to have two standards: one for translating Hebrew and Israeli names, and one for full-fledged transliteration in articles on the Hebrew language. Regardless, even if we want to use Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) for both, we really can't start using it until it's become policy and is relatively stable. Ruakh 11:57, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually, having thought a bit further, I think this article should use the world- and Wikipedia-wide standard of the International Phonetic Alphabet. We can still have a section at the top explaining exactly which IPA symbols are being used in the article. Hebrew's sound inventory differs sufficiently from English's that it's not like the English transliterations are much more transparent, even to those who don't know the IPA yet. Any thoughts? Ruakh 13:42, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I almost completely agree, but it would probably be better to just link to the Hebrew phonology article than to have a describe the IPA transcription of Hebrew again. Mo-Al 15:41, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Ooh, good call. :-) Ruakh 16:50, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I found the article confusing because of its use of IPA - the separate article on Hebrew verb conjugation is much better. The problems I have with IPA are:

Hebrew is a Semitic language, so roots are important; using IPA obscures the roots to the point where the grammatical constructs often become unclear
Standard transcriptions for Hebrew use symbols in a way that directly conflicts with their use in IPA, most notably the apostrophe (aleph in Hebrew vs. primary stress in IPA). This makes the article extremely confusing for people who are actually familiar with the language.
The IPA used in the article reflects only one dialect of modern Hebrew; using a solid transliteration rather than phonetic transcription would eliminate this problem.

To compare, look at the article on Arabic grammar, which I think does a far better job of maintaining the spirit of the language in the discussion of its grammar than this article does. Discussions of how the structures are rendered in actual speech should probably be reserved for the article on Hebrew phonology. Dave 05:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

"Standard transcription" is not so standard (every system has its idiosyncracies; and see Wikipedia talk:Hebrew and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Hebrew) to see how little agreement there is on what non-IPA system to use in places where IPA is inappropriate), and typically isn't much more helpful at identifying roots (since the same grapheme is generally used for vav as for vet, for khaf as for khet, for alef as for ayin, etc.; and often alef and ayin are even represented the same way as shva na'). It's true that some things differ between IPA and common ad-hoc transcription schemes, but I don't think that's a huge deal; heck, IPA transcription for English isn't necessarily readable to an English speaker who doesn't know IPA (what with [j] usually corresponding to English <y> and so on). If you take a minute or two to familiarize yourself with the IPA symbols used in the article, it's really not so confusing. (Incidentally, I'm not terribly happy with the IPA symbols myself; as I went through and IPA-itized the article, there were a lot of places where I really wanted to use a [ʔ] or a [ɛ] to represent what seemed to me to be the normal pronunciations, but I decided from the outset to trust Hebrew phonology. If there are problems with Hebrew phonology's IPA-itizations, then I think that should be addressed and fixed there first, and then the results can be brought over here.) —Ruakh_TALK 06:58, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

I think my issue is that they've found a perfectly good way to do it for Arabic, so why not for Hebrew? In fact, there's a completely unambiguous transcription scheme here: Proto-Semitic#Sound_changes_between_Proto-Semitic_and_the_daughter_languages - just use the Roman characters under the column labeled "Hebrew", (leaving out ḡ for intervocalic gimmel).

Also, why worry about the shva sound at all - it's just a pronunciation aid in Modern Hebrew anyway. Leave it out. Just my 2 cents. 17:57, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Since the transliteration system is just a preface, perhaps it should be at the beginning of the article, or better, farmed out to a subpage--Judah

By the way, shouldn't this page also contain Hebrew script? Although it may not be useful to non-Hebrew speakers, it's much more easy to read for us. Mo-Al 15:12, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I hope that is of any help to you but there are rules made by the academy of the hberew language here is their PDF: http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/PDF/taatik2006.pdf--Erezbinot 05:10, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Relative clauses

The section on relative clauses down at the bottom of the page actually didn't say anything about them, but talked about other kinds of dependent clauses. Since relative clauses are formed in a similar manner, I added an example of how they work and changed the section heading to be more general. Since the text referred to the example sentences as "compound," I used that term, although I think the term used in English grammar would be "complex".

Admittedly, though, I'm not a native speaker, so I wouldn't be surprised if I've made a mistake somewhere. Masily box 20:49, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Your edit was good. Relative clauses don't actually always use she — there also exists the standalone relative pronoun/relativizer asher — but since asher is only used in very formal speech and writing and in a few fixed constructions, I don't think it's a big deal to simplify and say that they use she. That section still needs work, but your edit was a good start. Thank you! Ruakh 01:25, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

as a native speaker i would like to help you, in general "she" is used but it is not true to say that asher is only for very formal use but it is more formal than "she" in some areas like law it is very rare to see "she" ferther more you can ad prifixes like k- "kshe" or "kasher" to mention time or use a difrent pronoun "ki" to mention cose. i do beg your forgivenes if i make any croud mistakes, after all my native toung is hebrew. --Erezbinot 05:17, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Sentences without verbs

The text contains this note in the "sentences without verbs" section: "(A more English-like ordering, [ze mu'zaʁ ʃe-hu a'maʁ kaχa], literally "it strange that-he said thus", is also possible.)" Correct me if I'm wrong, but the ze (זה) at the beginning of that sentence, even if often used colloquially, would be incorrect, would it not? Isn't the proper way to say that sentence simply, "מוזר שהוא אמר כך" without a subject at all? J21 15:52, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

My experience with Hebrew being mostly spoken, I asked my father (who was born and raised in Israel and lived there until his thirties), and he was very surprised by the question; his impression is that the two are completely interchangeable, with no difference in correctness, formality, tone, etc. (Other speakers may have different impressions, though, and it's possible that a pedantic elementary-school teacher would feel differently.) In this case, since the [ze] is really helpful for conveying the English-like-ness, I'd prefer that we keep it, but if you can find a source that says it should be omitted, I wouldn't object to dropping it. Ruakh 21:07, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

i have to agree it sounds very "wrong" to sey "ze" in the beagening of the sentence and מוזר שהוא אמר כך can also be said מוזר שזה מה שהוא אמר may be a little difference in maenning but all the same a valid form. any way the origanal sounds like a children talk.. --Erezbinot 05:23, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Small questions

This is a very impressive article. I had a few minor questions:

-under nif'al it mentions that nidbak has no pa'al counterpart. I think this is not so much because davak is out of use, but because in modern Hebrew huf'al is dying and many hif'il verbs have appropriated nif'al for their passive. Other examples: hirtiv (wet) gives nirtav, histir (conceal) gives nistar. In fact, under hif'il you also mention hidlik and nidlak.

-under hif'il you translate ma'amar as "speech." I could be wrong about this, but I think ma'amar means "article" (as in magazine article). "Speech" would more properly be ne'um or maybe hartza'a.

-under constructs, it mentions that the masculine singular noun generally does not change. Actually, many of them drop an initial vowel: davar gives dvar Torah (commentary on the Torah), makom gives mkom chaniya (parking spot), sha'on gives sh'on yad (watch). Maybe this is being picky.

-also under constructs, it says that the definite article is always placed before the second noun. Historically this is true, but today I think it's quite common to say ha-beit sefer, ha-tsumat lev. It's still "wrong," though, I guess.

-and now to be pedantic: under relative clauses you say kmo she-amarti...more correct would be kefi she-amarti, I think. Like the above, kmo she- is common but I don't know if it's "correct."

I didn't correct any of these myself because I thought I'd let the people who did most of the work vet them first. Mlevie 18:14, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

First of all, please be bold. I think I'm one of the biggest contributors to this article (though of course it's impossible to gauge with any definitiveness), and I welcome any changes you can make to improve the article. After all, that's the whole point of a wiki. That said, let me try to respond to your questions:

-[nis'taʁ], at least, is a very ancient word; it appears in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible. Your other examples don't seem to be used in the Bible (at least, not in their third-person-masculine-singular-suffix-conjugation forms), but I'm not convinced that they really support your claim, anyway; it seems to me that nif'al differs from huf'al in that nif'al tends to imply the lack of an agent, while huf'al tends to imply the presence of one. That's just my impression, though, and I'm not exactly an expert; I grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family in the U.S., so my impressions aren't based on a very diverse range of inputs.

-You're quite right about [maa'maʁ].

-I think the description in the article ("The singular of a masculine noun typically does not change form." "There are many words (usually ancient ones) that have changes in vocalization in the construct form. For example, the construct form of ['bajit] (house) is [bejt].") is accurate. "Accurate" does not mean "perfect", though, and if you think it would improve the article to mention nouns like these, then by all means, please do so.

-You're right. It's worth discussing here to what kind of grammar we want this article to reflect; it currently wavers somewhat between "correct" grammar and street grammar. We've discussed certain specific examples here (e.g. [aten tiʃmə'ʁu] vs. [aten tiʃ'moʁna], but I think it's worth having a general discussion.

-You mean, [kə'fi ʃea'maʁti]? That doesn't make sense taken literally ("like the mouth of that I said"), and I've never heard it before. Do you perhaps mean [lə'fi ma ʃea'maʁti] ("to the mouth of what that I said", i.e. "according to what I said")? If so, then there's a definite difference in meaning, which I think is easier to see in the third person; [kə'mo ʃe'hu a'maʁ, en ma laa'sot] means "as he said, there's nothing to do" (i.e., "he said there's nothing to do, and he was correct"), while [l'fi ma ʃe'hu a'maʁ, en ma laa'sot] means "according to what he said, there's nothing to do" or "judging from what he said, there's nothing to do" (i.e., "he said there's nothing to do", perhaps "he's the one who said there's nothing to do, don't blame me if it turns out he was wrong"). I'd infer from the former, but not necessarily from the latter, that the speaker agrees with the statement and believes it to be correct. If [kə'mo ʃea'maʁti] is indeed considered incorrect, then I'll have to think a while to figure out what the correct version would be.

Ruakh 21:43, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm not a native speaker either, hence the lack of boldness in most of my claims--but I can be pretty sure of the last one. I'm sure you're right that the expression [kə'fi ʃe] makes no sense "literally," but neither does [lə'fi ʃe], which is not what I meant at all. [kə'fi ʃe] and [kə'mo ʃe] are identical in meaning, and they translate "as" in the sense of "as I said..." or "as you know, Ruakh.." or "as we discussed last Thursday..." and the like.

It's just that [kə'mo ʃe] is more "colloquial" (and probably far more common) and I was confused because in other parts of the article you were careful to use very "correct" grammar. Try Googling [kə'fi ʃea'maʁti] if you don't believe it exists and means the same thing.

As for "street" versus "official" grammar, in Hebrew it seems to me this is far tougher than in most languages. You don't want an official source like Wikipedia to teach anything too "street," nor do you want it to imply that you might hear someone actually say [aten tiʃ'moʁna], which I have only seen written and then very rarely. Mlevie 17:55, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Wow, "כפי שאמרתי" does indeed get a lot of Google-hits — more than one-third as many as "כמו שאמרתי". I must always have just mentally translated the former to the latter without even noticing. Ruakh 18:13, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, just to reaffirm, כפי שאמרתי is a very common expression in Hebrew.--EngineeringCat 02:04, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I changed "As in English most sentences have subjects" because all English sentences have subjects. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.60.250.255 (talk) 22:20, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Would you count sentence words? Mo-Al (talk) 23:06, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

external link is broken

the link to gesenius' grammar isn´t opening a valid page. please, try to fix it and contact me at raimundo_viana(at)hotmail(dot)com with the subject Retornaire (my nick at pt-wiki) . Thanks —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 201.32.215.132 (talk) 18:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC).

Why the overuse of IPA?

It seems that in this article, the actual written Hebrew is heavily dropped in favor of IPA pronunciation transliteration. Gotta fix that. --OneTopJob6 11:00, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Rethinking the transliteration system here

I know you guys have invested time into putting all of the transliteration into IPA form, but to the average encyclopedia reader (like myself) who is not familiar with the IPA system, this is much less readable than simple English transliteration, and rather irritating. There are only two or three letters that really have no English equivalent: wouldn't it be simpler to use IPA symbols only for those, if at all? Better still would be to use the old conventions like "kh" or "ch". The IPA symbols could be used in defining what those represent, at the start of the article. What do you think? --Judah

I don't want to get into an edit war over this, but if no one even responds here, I guess I'll just have to be bold and edit the page myself. 'Twould be better if we could discuss this first, though. My contention is that the IPA format makes the page far less readable. A simple transliteration system along the one outlined in the "Naming conventions" page would be much easier for the casual reader to follow. JudahH 17:34, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for not replying earlier. We're currently working on a romanization scheme at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew); feel free to join in the discussion there. Until there's some consensus, though, I think we should stick with IPA here. (I think we should include Hebrew text as well — without nikud, just the way you'd see it in a newspaper — but not romanized Hebrew.) —Ruakh_TALK 17:40, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

There may be some disagreement for letters like khes that don't have English equivalents, but for the most part, everyone agrees about the basic things, like "sh" and not "ʃ" for shin. The problem with IPA notation is that it forces the casual reader to go research the IPA system just to understand how to pronounce a word. (Perhaps you are familiar with it, but I think most readers will not be). If the article was about Hebrew phonology, there would be more of a case to use as precise a notation as possible, but it's an article about grammar. The really fine details of pronunciation are simply not essential to the article, all the more so as there's no consensus among Hebrew-speakers re pronunciation.

I agree that there should be Hebrew text as well. I'm not sure why you're against nikud: if we need to indicate the vowelization, that's what nikud is for. In an article about Hebrew grammar, nikud is surely more appropriate than ungrammatical yuds and vavs to take its place.

However, the main thing I'm concerned about is the IPA notation. Take my word for it as a reader who is not very familiar with it: it's an extreme hindrance to readability, and I can't see the need for it. Why not do our best to romanize it in a simple way, and incorporate Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) as consensus is reached there? JudahH 22:39, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Stick with IPA. The point about IPA is that, once you have cracked it, you can use it when it is applied to any language. Yes, it takes some effort to learn, but some things are worth the effort. Any new romanization scheme that is developed will need explanation – they always do. IPA is a long-established standard, in the public domain. EEye 23:21, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

IPA is a very useful thing. However, I question its necessity in this article. 1) The subject of the article is not phonology but grammar. Pronunciation is only incidental to this subject, and exhaustive detail is not needed. 2) For better or for worse, the casual reader will probably not know IPA notation. Whom is an encyclopedia written for if not the casual reader? 3) IPA notation gives an impression of accuracy which is simply not true: there are several variations in the way different speakers pronounce the language. For all these reasons, but particularly for the reason of readability to the average reader, I strongly feel the IPA should be scrapped in favor of something more reader-friendly. JudahH 04:57, 17 July 2007 (UTC)