@mariajma replied to your post “@mariajma replied to your post “Gotta love Hebrew, probably the only…”
It is true lmaoooo What are the main reasons Hebrew is ambiguous? Chinese is plainly an overly poetic language in my opinion and the Chinese are very fond of being extremely roundabout when speaking
Ha ha, in Hebrew it’s mainly because 1) Hebrew is relatively poor (in quantity) when it comes to words, so one word can mean multiple things 2) unfortunately many consonants were lost from Biblical Hebrew to Modern Hebrew, but it led to many different words, which are spelt differently, sounding the same, thus creating even more ambiguity 3) Hebrew is rich in registers, so one thing can mean various things, depending on its register -
A hilarious example of it was when my friend, who had then recently read an old book with 70′s high register Hebrew and was then heavily influenced by it, told me AT WORK what I thought was ‘we need to fuck patiently’ (which would be the modern Hebrew slang interpretation of it), but actually meant ‘we need to arm ourselves with patience’ (so, basically, we need to be patient XD) you can only imagine my utter confusion until I understood she meant it the high register way, not the slang way XD
4) Hebrew is just RICH with slang expressions AND high register expressions and you never know what to expect (see example above)
5) Being a Semitic language, it has unique morphology and lets us play a lot with roots and verb & nouns patterns, thus allowing some creativity with creating new slang words.
6) Also LOADS of loan words from MULTIPLE languages, and normally, each load word often has, again, multiple interpretations.
The example in the previous post contained the loan word ‘look’ from English, which in Hebrew normally is borrowed to refer to a person’s Lewk(tm), as in, their fashion/style, but it can also function in its basic meaning of a ‘look’. The expression for to show off a look essentially literally means something like ‘to knock a look’, and its normal interpretation is ‘to show off your look(tm)/style’, but it can also be interpreted as ‘to give someone a strong look’, ie, implied eye-fucking, which is also helped by the fact that the Hebrew verb for ‘to knock’ also means ‘to fuck’, so basically that wordplay has three fucking layers to it ha ha
I do not envy people who try to study Hebrew as a second language at all lmfao