Verbworld
April 2nd, 2008Day three of my diary on language. The Economist titled this post “Leheadline” in reference to Hebrew’s tendency to adopt and verbify foreign words. Actually, if you did Hebraicise “to headline” it would be “lehadlen”.
The starkness and innovation of Hebrew
IN HIS short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Jorge Luís Borges, an Argentine writer who was also a philologist, posited an imaginary language in which there are no nouns, only verbs. “The moon rose above the river” is rendered as “upwards behind the onstreaming it mooned”.
This is not as bizarre as it sounds. The Semitic and Slavic languages (and no doubt others that I’m unfamiliar with) share one trait: their core, the ur-words of the language, are verbs. Whereas in English most nouns and adjectives are a separate species, in these languages most of them are derived from verb roots.
For instance, the Russian for “warehouse” is sklad, which comes from the verb for “to put” with a prefix meaning “off” or “down” — ie, a place where you put things away. As I mentioned on Monday, a letter in both Hebrew and Arabic is a “written thing”. And an earpiece for a mobile phone, as I learned when I bought one in Bethlehem the other week, is, at least in the local dialect of Arabic, a sama’a — a “hearing”.
If you pay close attention to the words in those languages, therefore, you can develop the eerie sensation that the world around you is composed not of things but of actions. Maybe that was what inspired Borges. In English his sentence looks odd, but in poetic forms of Hebrew, Arabic or Russian, it could be just about acceptable.
Hebrew has such a methodical formula for turning verbs into nouns that it can be run in reverse too, allowing you to verbify any word at will. Hebrew-speakers do this with abandon, since the early Zionists, who famously resurrected and built Hebrew into a modern language, couldn’t foresee a lot of today’s needs.
Hence “to program” a computer has become letakhnet, from tokhnit, which is a plan or programme, though a computer program is tokhna (the kh here is like a German or Scottish ch). “To update” is le’adken, which, much like in English, comes from ad kan, “up to now”. But Israelis freely verbify foreign words too: lenatrel is “to neutralise”, and a graphic designer will offer leratesh, “to retouch”. In the wake of Condoleezza Rice’s shuttle diplomacy last year, Israeli officials reportedly coined lecondel, meaning to go back and forth repeatedly to no effect.
Naturally, all this exasperates purists. Israeli state radio seems to have adopted the gatekeeper role that the Real Academia Española plays for Spanish, and fights a losing battle against foreign loan-words. Newsreaders will occasionally slip in the correct but virtually unknown Hebrew word before its more popular equivalent, eg, “yakhda — koalitsiya” (coalition), in a heroic but vain attempt to re-educate the masses.
In its pure form, though, Hebrew is a spartan tongue, with one of the smallest lexicons of any major language. Even the words it does have, it uses sparingly. “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” has only five words in the original. The press release for the Winograd commission report into the second Lebanon war, which was released in January, took up 3495 words in English and 2547 in Hebrew.
This gives Hebrew a certain stark elegance when spoken well-a style perhaps appropriate to the simple days of kibbutz life, though it is a desert compared with the richness of many other languages. But the shortage of words occasionally forces twists of poetry into everyday speech. You can “love” something in Hebrew, but there is no word for “to like”. Instead, you say “it finds favour in my eyes.”