Another interesting post by Anatoly Vorobey at Avva (again, I translate from his Russian); he shows a shop sign that says in Hebrew “Air conditioning / Please close the door” and says:
But the phrase ‘to close the door’ lacks the definite article ha and the direct object particle et: instead of “lisgor et hadelet,” it’s written “lisgor delet.” The effect is a bit comical, difficult to convey in Russian; it’s as if someone wrote, “We have air conditioning; please close a door somewhere.” Or if in English it was “Air conditioning inside, please close a door.” The sign was probably written by “Russians” [i.e., Russian immigrants to Israel].
This particle et is a strange thing; you can omit it (but leave the definite article) and then it looks sort of like high style: “na lisgor hadelet.” I searched the Hebrew Language Academy website and found an interesting note about it: it seems it’s not entirely clear why in Biblical Hebrew this particle is sometimes absent before an object with a definite article. And David Ben-Gurion, the founding father and first prime minister of modern Israel, couldn’t stand it, considered it harmful, and deliberately didn’t use it in writing.
But he failed to break the established et ha- tradition, and people generally continue to use et even more than in the past (for example, in phrases like “I have [something]”). And they usually ask visitors to close et ha-door. Not like in this sign.
I find that very intriguing, and I hope Hatters with more Hebrew than I will have things to say about it.
Quite a few languages make a thing over whether direct objects are definite or not. Turkish comes to mind immediately.
The use of et with definite accusatives in Biblical Hebrew prose is usual, but there are lots of exceptions. It seems to be a famously difficult area: Waltke and O’Connor’s Biblical Hebrew Syntax devotes several pages to it, in the process citing studies showing that omission of the particle differs significantly between Genesis and 1 Samuel. On the other hand, it is rare with indefinite objects. But it does occasionally turn up with non-accusatives, too .. Hebrew (like Classical Ethiopic) often construes the technically-nominative noun in possessive expressions of the type “to me there is ..” (i.e. “I have ..”) like an object.
In BH terms, lisgor is actually a (“construct”) infinitive rather than an imperative; but infinitives can take et with definite accusatives too, so it wouldn’t make any odds AFAIK. I don’t know any Israeli Hebrew.
How different is this shop sign to the fairly common U.S. restaurant door signs, “No bare feet”?
According to Rudolf Meyer’s Hebräische Grammatik:
Meyer also points out that there are cases in the masoretic text where ‘t stands with the subject, not the object, and that this seems to have occured even more often in the pre-masoretic tradition. Hebrew, unlike the earlier Ugaritic, had lost its case endings and so a particle to point out the direct object was useful.
That’s what I figured: the case ending disappeared, the nominative-accusative alignment of the language did not, word order apparently did not become rigid enough to take over the function of marking direct objects, and so an existing particle was very gradually repurposed for this. See also: the preposition a marking the, specifically, animate accusative in Spanish.
That doesn’t account for the link to definiteness, though.
Kusaal has an ambiguity affecting the sequence VERB nɛ OBJECT, where nɛ is a focus particle that can, in principle, be taken either with the verb or with the object. But one of the disambiguating hints is that if the object is definite, it is actually unlikely to be focused, because the prototypical kind of focus is on new information. (This is not the only role of focus: there is also contrastive focus, for example. But it is the commonest.)
[To make life even more complex, there is also a completely homophonous preposition nɛ “with”, but happily there are some fairly straightforward syntactic tests which can distinguish it from the focus marker.]
Punic had this particle too, IIRC. A Modern Canaanitish thing.
The sign נא לסגור דלת na lisgór délet ‘please close door’ has the same subjective effect on me as would a sign in the imperfect English of some Chinese speakers, shorn of articles and plurals. In this case it’s not just that ʾet was omitted, but also the ha- definite article, which suggests a Russian speaker with imperfect Hebrew.
ʾet omission has a long history. Peter Bekins’s dissertation/book on differential object marking in Biblical Hebrew is the most recent comprehensive treatment, and he has some papers at academia dot edu. In medieval Spanish-Provençal Hebrew ʾet is omitted quite often, perhaps, some speculate, under the influence of case loss in Romance.
According to Yael Reshef’s book, העברית בתקופת המנדט Hebrew in the Mandate Period, the use of ʾet before definite nouns was quite variable in Revival/Haskalic Hebrew (I wonder what the model for that was; sounds like a subject for a dissertation, if there isn’t one already.) That persisted in the Hebrew of Palestine until ca. 1920, after which the obligatory use of ʾet before definites became standard.
Gil Hovav, a raconteur and writer, wrote four wonderful volumes of memoirs (with recipes) of his childhood and his family, including his grandmother, Lea Ben-Avi (née Abushdid), nicknamed Muma. Muma grew up in a Ladino- and Arabic-speaking household, and later married Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and she spoke in the peculiar dialect of the Ben-Yehuda clan. Hovav’s books are rich with examples of her speech. I don’t have the books with me, but the frequent (or universal?) absence of ʾet marking is very noticeable from what I remember.
As to Ben-Gurion, I understand that he was somewhat of an opinionated blowhard, so however he chose to speak or write, I wouldn’t take seriously his opinions about what is truly “correct” or not.
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In German, such signs are actually quite likely to say Bitte Tür schließen – no article, no preposition or case marking, infinitive.
(Next most common is Bitte die Tür schließen, though – definite article, but identical nom./acc., so in effect no case marking.)
(Abushadid should be Abushdid.)
(Fixed it.)
Very often you see die Türe schließen — using an archaic form that outside of such signs has completely died out in both spoken and written Standard German.
lisgor delet is 100% Russian-L1 coded for me. I read it with an accent.
If it’s fun code-switching with “et” that you’re after, look no further than my daughter’s phenomenal production aged 4.6. If you don’t feel like running the built-in translator on your browser, you can skip to the syntactic illustration down the post that paints the general picture.
Similarly in American English a sign saying “close door when finished” would usually just be perceived as telegraphic English, not wrong.
@ulr
Dwds has “besonders mitteldeutsch” (so regional) for Türe and gives this corpus example:
Von Händlern an der Türe sollte man keine größeren Dinge kaufen. [Bundesverband d.dt. Standesbeamten e. V. (Hg.), Hausbuch für die deutsche Familie, Frankfurt a. M.: Verl. f. Standesamtwesen 1956, S. 140]
Does “Ding” instead of “Sache” here make the sentence seem more official? In English, I think “items” would have this effect.
1950’s Beamtendeutsch. And Türe here is dative, where the -e is slightly less archaic. And Ding instead of the now more usual Sache — somehow this feels like the language in 1950s TV news.
Because of its occasional use with the subject, Meyer thinks ‘t was originally a Hervorhebungspartikel, meant to simply emphasize the following word; I think such emphasizing would happen mostly with definite nouns.
That’s really what I was disputing (rather opaquely) with my Kusaal example. In English (and Kusaal) definiteness, because it marks something as already given, either in the discourse or the common assumed culture, tends to background its NP, making it less likely to be focused (which in English, but not Kusaal, comes out as sentence-level stress.)
Terms like “Hervorhebungspartikel” tend to get thrown about very loosely in contexts like these. It’s also all too easy when it comes to written texts to read emphasis into the text as required to fit the hypothesis.
The whole area of focus and emphasis is very slippery and difficult to get to grips with, even when you are not dealing with a dead language with a very small corpus, and have got real live informants to play with. Furthermore, there is no consensus about what e.g. “focus” really means in general linguistic terms. There are even nihilists who deny that any real cross-linguistic meaning can be assigned to the term at all.
There are similar problems with Russian -то, which I’m still trying to get a handle on. Being a colloquial particle, it’s especially slippery.
My memory did not deceive me about Punic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_language
Plautus’ Poenulus has Hanno saying:
Yth alonim ualoniuth sicorathii
“I remember (i.e. venerate) the gods and goddesses …”
@Hat: maybe this is all way too basic for you, but in my mind, -то is usually about contrast with some implicit alternative. For the examples on that Wiktionary page, in order:
Ну я-то не ста́ну туда́ ходи́ть. (as opposed to some other people)
Я и зна́ть-то его́ не хочу́. (let alone be friends/work together/whatever)
Об э́том-то я и хоте́л с ва́ми поговори́ть. (and not whatever else we’ve been standing around chatting about)
А я-то ду́мал… (but apparently you/the universe had something else in mind)
The first and fourth examples can also have же, but it would mean something slightly different because же calls back to some previous part of the conversation:
Ну я же не ста́ну туда́ ходи́ть. (how could you imply otherwise?)
А я же ду́мал… (as demonstrated by I was saying before)
The usual view of the etymology of Hebrew ʾēt can be illustrated by the treatment in E. Lipiński (1997) Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (I couldn’t find anywhere I could link to it online besides Google Books, whose scans will probably not be visible to many LH readers; it is freely avaible from the digital jianghu, of course; apologies for any text capture errors):
The cross-reference goes here:
But now see David Testen (1997–98) ‘Morphological Observations on the Stems of the Semitic “Nota Accusativi” ’ Archiv für Orientforschung 44/45: 215–21 (available on JSTOR here) and Aren Wilson-Wright (2016) ‘A Reevaluation of the Semitic Direct Object Markers’. Hebrew Studies 57: 7–15 (available here). This is summarized by Pat-El and Wilson-Wright (2018) ‘Features of Aramaeo-Canaanite’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 138, as follows:
Perhaps there are even some different, more recent, post-pandemic analyses that I have not read yet.
F: Thanks, that helps. I know the basic idea, but I’m never sure exactly when to use it unless it’s in a collocation I’m familiar with (наконец-то!).
@hat, F
The whole issue seems to be a bit stranger, e.g.,
Наконец-то я дома.
v
Наконец я дома.
https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/15594/%d0%bd%d0%b0%d0%ba%d0%be%d0%bd%d0%b5%d1%86-vs-%d0%bd%d0%b0%d0%ba%d0%be%d0%bd%d0%b5%d1%86-%d1%82%d0%be
An answer to another SE query seems to indicate it sometimes means “and then what?” (rhetorical Q in statements and request for confirmation/elaboration in questions).
—
• — Сашина жена ему изменяет. — Он это знает. // “Sasha’s wife is cheating on him”. “He knows that”.
This is a piece of watercooler gossip which can begin and end just like that.
• — Сашина жена ему изменяет. — Он-то это знает. // “Sasha’s wife is cheating on him”. “He knows that(, so what’s next?)”.
Here, the second party is telling two things:
• Sasha knowing that the fact that his wife is cheating is somehow already in context. Maybe it’s common knowledge. Maybe it’s not relevant to the discussion. Maybe the second party thinks that “Sasha knows” or “Sasha doesn’t know” is an expected response (so it’s it context for them).
• The discussion should further elaborate how to deal with this knowledge. This further development is kinda expected, so the second party cannot just stop conversation like that, that would be awkward.
So in a sense, the second party says “OK, I know you’re expecting to hear whether or not Sasha knows his wife is cheating. I’ll tell you that he does, because that’s what you’re expecting to hear, but at the same time I want to underline that I assume this should be past discussion and develop on that”
Note that the topic of the conversation is not whether Sasha knows or not. The topic is “We have established that Sasha knows”. It’s a very fine line but it’s still there.
For questions, the shared context may be something that the parties have been discussing previously. So using -то might bring that thing back as a topic and expect some development on it.
— Мы едем в Америку. — А потом вы вернётесь? // “We’re going to America”. “Will you come back?”
The question is just a request for information.
— Мы едем в Америку. — А потом-то вы вернётесь? // “We’re going to America”. “About what happens next: you’re coming back, aren’t you?”
—
https://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/22667/why-do-russians-add-%d1%82%d0%be-behind-a-word/22670#22670
Thanks, I knew it was more complicated!
@ulr
-e is the archaic dative, not accusative. ‘die Türe schließen’ is clearly something else—viz the (unmarked and unremarkable) accusative of Türe, not Tür
in my opinion
In case you were wondering, in Biblical Hebrew אֵת ʾēṯ is the basic form, when it appears as an independent particle, while אֶת ʾeṯ is the reduced form, when it appears as a clitic. In pointed Modern Hebrew (Children’s books, poetry) I believe it’s always אֶת ʾeṯ.
For a feminine???
…I agree, even though I’ve watched very little 1950s TV news (what with being −30 years old at the time).
Yes; the dative is in an der Türe – again of Türe, not of Tür, though.
@Y: I seem to remember it was always אֶת in our HSL material, as you say.
Is Anatoly Vorobey telling me that some people now say “Yesh li et ha-sefer”?
I don’t know if he did, but people absolutely do, and have for the last century or so. The Academy is very much against it. To me, yesh li et hasefer ‘I have the book’ indeed sounds alien and sloppy, but the normative yesh li hasefer sounds to me just plain ungrammatical. It’s a very basic everyday expression, which I don’t know how to say in a satisfying manner.
@Jerry, yes, as Y says, “yesh li et…” is more or less the norm in the vernacular. You can hear many examples at Youglish: https://youglish.com/pronounce/יש_לי_את/hebrew
In Biblical Hebrew, yesh mostly predicates existence (“there’s a …) which tends not to collocate happily with a following definite noun. No idea about Israeli Hebrew.
I note that et after yesh actually does occur in BH, e.g. 2 Kings 10:15 הֲיֵ֧שׁ אֶת־לְבָבְךָ֣ יָשָׁ֗ר “Is your heart upright?”
Classical Ethiopic expresses “have” using non-verbal sentences with bə “with”, and the thing possessed goes in the accusative: bəya beta “I have a house.”
@Y This sounds like the difference between:
Затворете врата
Затворете вратата
Затворете я вратата
Затворете я врата
The addition of “я” accusative feminine” sounds like like you’re annoyed with people who have not been closing the door habitually. “Затворете врата” sounds like it would have been written someone whose L1 does not have definite articles. “Затворете вратата” is neutral. “Затворете я вратата” sounds like it’s an instrunction to someone who goes there habitually, but forgets to close the door, but it’s a recent development. “Затворете я врата” sounds a bit regional, and also habitual, but that personal, and a bit eastern.
A few throw away remarks about Russian -то with the only qualification of being a native “never et ha” speaker.
1) There are fixed expressions like кто-то where -то became part of the word and is written with dash only by convention
2) Trying to generalize the meaning of -то I cannot get to anything more specific then emphasis. Any specific extra meaning depends on the context.
3) From F’s contrastive examples #4: А я-то ду́мал… is not necessarily contrastive. It means that the new information is contrary to my expectations, but doesn’t implicate anyone else.
4) PlasticPaddy’s examples. — Сашина жена ему изменяет. — Он-то это знает. No specific meaning. If it were a question Он-то это знает? would emphasize that it is “he” for whom this information is most relevant.
— Мы едем в Америку. — А потом-то вы вернётесь? In this case, it is the question form that has no specific meaning of -то. The indicative form А потом-то вы вернётесь would have meant that whatever situation is left in the place of departure, which might not be relevant in America, will catch with them on return. There is a contrastive element in this case.
Thanks!
For an in-depth article on yeš et ha- clauses in Modern Hebrew, see Taube’s “The Usual Suspects: Slavic, Yiddish, and the Accusative Existentials and Possessives in Modern Hebrew” (Journal of Jewish Languages 3(1–2), 27, 2015. doi: 10.1163/22134638-12340035. Also at ac.ed., here). Abstract:
I am not sure, but I think yēš + dative possessive clauses were rare in Hebrew in general until the Haskalah period, and I’ve wondered if they became popular in part through echoing the sound of Russian у + dative + есть clauses.
Hebrew yeš! as an exclamation can express excitement at a moment of success, like a soccer goal or receiving good news. I don’t know if it’s entirely native, as in ‘got it!’, or if it also echoes English “yes!”
Thanks, Y. That looks very interesting.
Come to think of it, you could claim that Welsh does something like this.
As in Hebrew or Russian, you express possession in Welsh by periphrasis with a preposition:
Mae gan Ifor gath.
is with Ivor cat
“Ivor has a cat.”
But the interesting thing here is that cath “cat” has the soft mutation, like an object:
Welodd Ifor gath
saw Ivor cat
“Ivor saw a cat.”
I think this is a bit misleading, though, as other sentences of this kind with a prepositional phrase as “logical subject” also mutate the “logical object”:
[Mae] rhaid i Ifor fynd.
[is] necessity to Ivor go
“Ifor must go.”
with mynd “go” mutated.
I gather that the Welsh soft mutation of objects causes great problems for Orthodox Chomskyites, as it needs many epicycles to be brought into conformity with the Ultimate Theory. Cymru am byth!
Thanks, Y. That looks very interesting.
Seconded.
Hm. GPC thinks Welsh rhaid “necessity, obligation” may be borrowed from the Latin ratiō. How carefree my forebears must have been before the Romans came!
(Seems a bit of a stretch semantically.)
Thanks, Y and Anatoly. Things I’ve believed since childhood…
I’m currently looking at a carp recipe with raisins, walnuts and dill stuffing. Any Ideas?
Genitive. German has the dative with bei. The paper looks convincing, however; it’s particularly interesting that Ukrainian readily blends the two regionally available constructions (the above and “have” + acc.).
Why? Necessities & obligations are reasons to do things.
Ghastly. Get rid of at least the raisins and the walnuts and put the carp in the oven with some garlic! Wide variety of recipes googlable through Knoblauchkarpfen.
Genitive.
I was hoping no one would catch that, especially since the abstract I quoted above it refers to the genitive.
Necessities & obligations are reasons to do things
True.
Long ago, I attended a Hebrew class which had students from different countries, including Argentina. One day, students were asked to read a paragraph in Hebrew that they had written themselves. One of the Argentine students was reading his composition, which sounded a little off, when the teacher broke in: “Wait, this is something that happens with a lot of Spanish students! They think that Hebrew et ha- is like Spanish de la, but it isn’t!” And she went over the grammar of using et.
This is from decades ago, and I may have misremembered. Is the above in fact a plausible error for Spanish?
I could more easily imagine someone thinking that et ha- was like a la before an animate noun.
Same here.