Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #hebrew

Most recents (24)

Yesterday I got to finish this semester's #Biblical #Hebrew teaching with a class on pausal forms. Heard from some colleagues that they found them a bit intimidating but the students got the hang of them. So I thought I'd share the three main rules I taught them 👇 1/11
First: what are pausal forms? Like in some other languages, many BH words have a separate form when a pause follows (or would in natural speech). For the first two rules, this can be the end of a sentence or a sentence-internal pause, like a comma in English. 2/11
RULE NUMBER ONE

In context (= when no pause follows), the stress shifts from an open syllable to a following word-final vowel and the vowel that used to be stressed is reduced, like:
*qāṭálū > קָֽטְל֫וּ
*yaqṭúlū > יִקְטְל֫וּ
*ʾánī > אֲנִ֫י
*béki > בְּכִ֫י
3/11
Read 12 tweets
A nerdy but practical thread 🧵 on paradigm (i.e. patterning) roots in Biblical Hebrew:
1/*
As @adamcmccollum notes and Rubin explores, the paradigm root is not uniform in BH grammar.
academia.edu/2603536/The_Pa…
2/*
ON ONE HAND, BH verb morphology is elegant & discrete. Person+Gender+Number inflect with verbal affixes. Ten forms make up the Prefix Conjugation (yiqtol/imperfective & wayyiqtol), nine forms the Suffix Conjugation (qatal/perfective & wəqatal).
3/*
hebrew.laits.utexas.edu/drupal/themes/…
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@EU_Commission @IntlCrimCourt Children of #Donbass - THE #WAR IS ON! CHILDREN vs THE #NAZIS | 5 months ago
rumble.com/v1odju5-childr…
#SaveOurChildren deNAZIfication - Special Military QperationZ WORLDWIDE
@EU_Commission @IntlCrimCourt cc: @ DaniMayakovski
#Ukraine. Images from the #Azov Battalion children's camp, where children from the age of 8 are #brainwashed into #Nazism and prepared militarily by indoctrinating them into a #hatred of #killing Russians. (2015)
@EU_Commission @IntlCrimCourt Ukrainian children drugged and indoctrinated by the #Nazis into shouting the #Hitler salute of "#SiegHeil" while being laughed at. (2016)
This video was captured from the flash drive of a press reporter from the #AzovBattalion at the #Mariupol base.
Image
Read 45 tweets
Some thoughts on the Proto-#Semitic word for 'woman, wife' on this #InternationalWomensDay.

The broad outlines of the reconstruction are clear, since many different languages have pretty similar forms. The stem must be something like *ʔV(n)θ-(a)t-. 1/11 Image
This *-(a)t- is the feminine suffix. From the same consonantal root, we also find some other words: #Arabic ʔunθā 'feminine', #Amorite(!) /taʔnīθ-um/, predictably bizarre Modern South Arabian forms like #Jibbali teθ, etc. (for Ancient South Arabian, see below). 2/11
Reconstructing the main word runs into three problems. From right to left:

1) *-at- or *-t- in the suffix?
2) *n or no *n?
3) *a or *i in the first syllable? 3/11
Read 11 tweets
On 28 Oct. 1993 Mr. Ariel Karem, Israel's 1st AMB to #Eritrea presented his credentials to Pres. Isaias. Israel sent a rep (befor Eritrea's official indp), Mr. Menashe Zipori on Feb 24, 1993 following the meeting between Pres. Isaias & PM Rabin on Feb 15, 1993 in #Israel. 1/11
#Eritrea & #Israel
#Jews first settled in Eritrea in the late 19th century, emigrating from #Yemen in search of econ & com opportunities. In 1905, #Asmara #Hebrew Congregation was formed. During the 1930s, many Jews arrived in Eritrea fleeing Nazi persecution in #Europe. 2/11
#Eritrea & #Israel
On June 26, 1943 #GreatBritain proposed the creation of Jewish colonies in #Eritrea as the extension #Jewish settlement in #Palestine. But this proposal did not materialize. 3/11
Read 11 tweets
1/Centuries before the #printingpress took off in Europe, printers in Egypt employed a type of woodblock printing known as “tarsh” (طرش). Only around 100 of these tarsh prints are known to exist. They are also very cool, so here’s a 🧵on #Arabic block prints in @theUL. #Cambridge
2/“Woodblock printing” is a term historians use to talk about making a big stamp and slapping paper onto it. Block printers would carve wood so the negative space looked like whatever image or text they wanted to print. Then they’d coat it in ink and stamp some paper. Easy.
3/Except it wasn’t easy. It takes a lot of skill to carve the negative image of Arabic calligraphy into a piece of wood. I mean just look at this thing. It’s an amulet quoting the #Quran that would have been carried for protection. Most tarsh prints are amulets like this.
Read 12 tweets
How did Jesus pronounce his own name? Hint: it wasn’t Jesus. Or even Yeshua. Or anything at all like Yahashawa or the many variants diligently documented by @arabic_bad. 1/14
The pronunciations like Yahawashi etc. come from the idea that in the #Hebrew alphabet (especially the Paleo-Hebrew one), every letter represents a syllable. You can then read the original form of the name, יהושע (Paleo 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤔𐤏) ‘Joshua’, as Ya-ha-wa-sha-i. Or something. 2/14
Other than pictures you see on the Internet, there is no basis for this way of reading Hebrew. It contradicts everything we know about how Hebrew was preserved, from how Hebrew names were spelled in Assyrian clay tablets to the reading traditions still used by Jews today. 3/14
Read 15 tweets
More of an article outline than a thread, but tweeting about an idea is more fun than looking up which 19th-century German already published it. So: a thread about the h in ʔĕlōhīm/allåhå/ʔilāh- etc. ‘god’, and why the #Hebrew word is morphologically plural. 1/20
Proto-#Semitic for ‘god’ can be reconstructed as *ʔil-, without *h. This is clear from #Akkadian il-, #Ugaritic i͗l, Hebrew ʔēl, maybe some others. Those last two are used both as common nouns and as names, uppercase-G ‘God’, ‘El’. 2/20
Meanwhile, there’s this other form, which reconstructs as *ʔilāh- (unchanged in Classical #Arabic). This is the basic word for ‘god, deity’ in Arabic and #Aramaic, e.g. Biblical Aramaic ʔĕlāh, #Syriac aloho/allåhå. 3/20
Read 20 tweets
The #Deltacron tweet made a big impression on me yesterday and I've been thinking about letter names ever since. One thing to note is that we like to pretend we know what the #Phoenician letter names were, but we don't really. Most of the names you see are actually #Hebrew. 1/10
That goes for names like "aleph". Sometimes you'll see reconstructed forms, like "ʾalp", which are closer to the #Greek names and partially also attested in the Septuagint of Psalm 119 (118 in Gk)—but there they're actually Hebrew too, of course. 2/10 en.katabiblon.com/us/index.php?t…
One place where the Greek and Semitic letter names show weird correspondences is with the sibilants. @pd_myers has recently published on this (paywall): academic.oup.com/jss/article/64… 3/10
Read 12 tweets
This is beautiful!
This little #manuscript seems to be written by a regular, non-professional, member of the Jewish community of Fustat, Egypt, about 1000 years ago.
They made a little shorthand manuscript of #Psalms, for their own personal use. Image
This person knew the Psalms pretty well, so could abbreviate most of the words by chopping off the last letter or two (which seems more impressive when you remember that #Hebrew words tend to be short: say, 2-6 letters in the main).
This little snippet is from Psalm 9: 17-18.

But here, the writer's knowledge of the book of Psalms has actually led them astray...

Do you see the line in the image with lots of dots over all the letters? Those are erasure dots: (s)he wants, in effect, to cross out that line.
Read 6 tweets
Presenting BoundaryNet - a resizing-free approach for high-precision weakly supervised document layout parsing. BoundaryNet will be an ORAL presentation (Oral Session 3) today at @icdar2021 . Project page: ihdia.iiit.ac.in/BoundaryNet/ . Details 👇 Image
Precise boundary annotations can be crucial for downstream applications which rely on region-class semantics. Some document collections contain irregular and overlapping region instances. Fully automatic approaches require resizing and often produce suboptimal parsing results. Image
Our semi-automatic approach takes region bounding box as input and predicts boundary polygon as output. Importantly, BoundaryNet can handle variable sized images without any need for resizing. Image
Read 23 tweets
Grateful for advice from #Hebrew and #Linguistics folk.

The Biblical name Naarah (נַעֲרָה) can be translated as ‘girl’.

A bit non-descript perhaps, but then some names are.

Clines, however, reads נַעֲרוֹתֶֽיךָ in Job 41.5 as ‘your sparrows’, which strikes me as plausible. Image
It also finds confirmation in a few apparent cognates from other languages, e.g.,

Mehri «nəγγōr» = ‘stork’,

Akkadian «nēru» = ‘a type of bird’ (from a lexical list), and

Arabic «nuγarat-» = ‘a red-billed sparrow’.
The question:

How much can be inferred about the base form of נַעֲרוֹתֶֽיךָ on the basis of the information above?

And what if anything does that tell me about the likelihood that the name נַעֲרָה is related to a ‘sparrow’ word?
Read 4 tweets
Examples of appropriation of #Arabic toponyms
List will name #Palestinian villages, place names depopulated before or in 1948, followed by #Israeli settlements with toponyms derived from names of destroyed #Palestinian villages:

#Lubya
Depopulated July 1948 (Bean in #Arabic)
#Lavi (Kibbutz); founded 1948 (Lion in #Hebrew)

#Al-Kabri ( Western #Galilee) depopulated on May 21st 1948
#Kabri (Kibbutz); founded 1949

#Alma (#Sadad district)
Depopulated on October 30th, 1948
#Alma (#moshav ) founded in 1949

#Biriyya;
Depopulated on May 2,
-, 1948

#Amqa (#Acre are)
Depopulated october, 1948
#Amka (Moshav) founded 1949

#Sajara (Lower #Galilee);
Depopulated: July, 1948
#Tree in #Arabic
#AynZaytun (Western #Galilee)
Spring #Olives in #Arabic
#Ilaniya (Tree in #Hebrew)+ #EinZeitim (kibbutz) Spring olive
Read 21 tweets
International Affairs /1-1
#Myanmar #Burma 🇲🇲
Myanmar's Generals
Run A Nearly Sanction-Proof
BUSINESS EMPIRE
Long Before Seizing Control
Of The Streets
by @oanhha @jwf825
& Khine Lin Kyaw
MAY 11, 2021
["bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-…"]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar
International Affairs /1-2
#Myanmar #Burma 🇲🇲
- Area : 676.5K km²
- Population : 53.6 M
- Capital : #Naypyidaw
largest city : #Yangon
ETHNICS
- #Bamar 68%
- #Shan 9%
RELIGIONS
- #Buddhism 88%
- #Christianity 6.2%
- #Islam 4.3%
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
#Burmese
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar Image
International Affairs /1-3
#Myanmar #Burma 🇲🇲
ECONOMY
- GDP (PPP) : US$355 B
Per capita : US$6.7 K
- #InformalEconomy :
one of the biggest in the world
- Rich in precious stones :
#Rubies 90% of world's
#Sapphires #Pearls #Jade
- #Tourism
- #Agriculture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar Image
Read 50 tweets
#China's crackdown on its tiny congregation of #Jews. ~100 practising in a community of ~1,000. That such a small group can attract the #CommunistParty’s ire shows how far the suppression goes @TelegraphWorld @Telegraph telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/1… #religiousfreedom #Hanukkah
Ancestors of those in #China claiming Jewish heritage – prob merchants from Persia – settled >1,000 yrs ago in Kaifeng, then a bustling imperial capital during Northern Song Dynasty. Through dynasties, wars, natural disasters, Cultural Revolution, they kept their history alive
Pressure now renewed under Chinese leader Xi Jinping's campaign against foreign influence, unsanctioned religions - all part of push to 'Sinicise' faith in #China. But the Kaifeng #Jews are a resilient bunch - as I discovered on a recent visit
Read 8 tweets
Short? thread on III-y verbs in #Aramaic:

Based on #Hebrew and #Arabic, we reconstruct a slightly irregular paradigm for the prefix conjugation for Pr-Cntrl-#Semitic, where the 3rd radical is lost word-finally:

imperfect *ta-bniy-u 'you build'; but
imperative *bni 'build!' 1/7
In Arabic, the *-iyu of the imperfect contracts to -ī, while the imperative adds i- before the cluster:

imperfect *ta-bniy-u > tabnī
imperative *bni > ibni

Cf. @PhDniX's article on triphthong contraction in Arabic: 2/7 academia.edu/32715681/The_d…
In Hebrew, *-iyu contracts to -ɛ̄, while the short *-i is lowered to *-e and then lengthened:

imperfect *ta-bniy-u > tiḇnɛ̄
imperative *bni > bnē

Cf. my article on these verbs here: 3/7 academia.edu/37673891/A_tri…
Read 7 tweets
#QuarantineWatchParty #onlyfans #news #newnormal
Let me share some things with you, I'll do my best to put it into words,and Let those the Creator of all Reality our Heavenly Father should have to see, see. Today we're going to talk about #Letters and stuff. #alphabetsoup
Let's look at a more controversial Alphabet, #Hebrew, where we even get the English word above from, Aleph Beth. Remember #children #Layers meanings within meanings #hmmyeeealright
So what letters stand out to you? Tha's nice, those which I noticed most are T-taw, Q-Qoph, And W - Waw or is that a Y, why oh me oh my? #WhyWomenKill #Youtube #Y
Read 25 tweets
THREAD: Below are a bunch of what look (to me) to be #Egyptian personal names in the #Hebrew Bible.

I’d be grateful for comments from #Semitists and, particularly, for possible translations from #Egyptologists .
I’ll start with a couple of obvious candidates (mentioned by Hoffmeier at least and no doubt others):

Judah’s genealogy mentions a guy named ‘Sheshan’ (1 Chr. 2),

who’s part of an ancestral chain which seeks to traverse Israel’s years in Egypt (though ultimately goes nowhere).
The name of his slave (‘Jarha’) looks like it’s composed of the Egyptian elements:

⟨wr⟩ = ‘great’, and

⟨ḫʕ⟩ = ‘the one who appears’, an epithet of ‘Re’ (from ⟨ḫʕi⟩ = ‘to appear’).

By way of illustration, here’s a name of the form ⟨Wr-DN⟩: Image
Read 19 tweets
The #Hebrew and #Aramaic vocalization sign shwa is sometimes read as a reduced vowel (hence the phonetic term schwa). Other times, it indicates the absence of any vowel. The rules are pretty clear, but there's some disagreement over words ending in 2 consonants with shwa. 1/6
For example, should Biblical Aramaic אַנְתְּה 'you (m.sg.)' be read as Ɂant or Ɂantə? (Yes, there's an extra ה at the end and yes, the Masoretes read shwa as a full vowel, not [ə]; that's all not relevant right now, you know what I mean.) 2/6
We can actually tell that no vowel was read in these cases from the lack of spirantization of following consonants. In #Daniel 4:15, for example, the vocalization has וְאַ֨נְתְּה בֵּלְטְשַׁאצַּ֜ר wə-Ɂant bēlṭəšaṣṣar and וְאַ֣נְתְּה כָּהֵ֔ל wə-Ɂant kāhēl. 3/6
Read 6 tweets
Time for some #Semitic geekery concerning 'hollow verbs'. These are verbs which have a vowel (usually long) where strong verbs have their second radical consonant, like #Arabic qām-a 'he stood up', ya-qūm-u 'he will stand up', #Hebrew qām, yā-qūm (same meanings). 1/9
It's controversial whether these hollow verbs already had this shape in Proto-Semitic. The alternative is that they originally had the consonant *w or *y as their second radical, but that this dropped out in various languages, causing vowel contraction. 2/9
I think the forms like ya-qūm- are Proto-Semitic, where they developed from even earlier forms like ya-qwum-. But because other forms (like Arabic and Hebrew qām-) show irregular correspondences between different languages, Proto-Semitic retained a consonant here IMO. 3/9
Read 9 tweets
Thoughts on #Hebrew of Job 19.23–24 welcome.

How do you ‘inscribe/engrave’ (חקק) in a ‘book’ (ספר)?

You could try ספר = ‘tablet’ (per Ugar. /spr/).

An alt. is to read בספר in light of בעט ברזל (per Ugar. /spr/ = Akk. /siparru/ = ‘bronze’).

But did people engrave with bronze? Image
A point in favour of the latter option might be that, everywhere else in Job, mentions of ‘iron’ have a parallel which mentions either copper or bronze (20.24, 28.2, 40.18, 41.27).
P.S. Arabic /ṣufr/ is also associated with copper and bronze, though I suspect that’s by virtue of association with ‘yellow’ (/ṣufār/ cp. modern /asfar/) rather than a cognate of ספר. Grateful for clarification if anyone has thoughts (@KoineGreek_com?).
Read 3 tweets
Around 3000 BCE in eastern #Europe, a Proto-Balto-Slavic #language started to diverge from #ProtoIndoEuropean.

The #Slavic branch of the #IndoEuropean #languages began about 2,000 years later when Proto-Slavic deviated from Proto-Balto-Slavic.

[Image: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Balt…] Source: The Indo-European L...
As the #Slavic-speaking area expanded during the first millennium CE (striped area on map), Proto-Slavic transitioned to Common Slavic. The #language underwent minor changes that occurred mostly uniformly across eastern #Europe, thereby maintaining mutual intelligibility. A map of eastern Europe sho...
Around the year 1000 CE #CommonSlavic began to split into the South, West, and East branches to which all modern #Slavic #languages belong.

Roughly 315m people speak a Slavic #language, mostly in Eastern #Europe (including the #Balkan peninsula), #CentralAsia, and #Siberia. A map of Europe highlightin...
Read 359 tweets
Here is a thread from my Covenant & Conversation essay on #KiTavo called "A Nation of Storytellers". You can read it at bit.ly/2mhK7K2, listen to it at bit.ly/2lWOXfO, or download the accompanying Family Edition at bit.ly/2kIfJbC. #ShabbatShalom Image
#Jews were the first people to find #God in history. They were the first to think in historical terms – of time as an arena of change as opposed to cyclical time in which the seasons rotate, people are born and die, but nothing really changes.
#Jews were the first people to write #history. Yet biblical #Hebrew has no word that means “history” (the closest equivalent is divrei hayamim, “chronicles”). Instead it uses the root zachor, meaning “memory.”
Read 9 tweets
Deeper meanings of the #HolyBible written in God’s language: #Hebrew. Each #Christian should learn & teach our children this truth. It’s more amazing than any other thing(s) part of the indoctrination within the public system.

This is OUR heritage. Judeo-Christian Heritage. Image
Nothing new under the sun. The study of the Holy Bible isn’t new however, it’s not a common thing for Christians today to study on a multi-dimensional level unless you’re family with Chuck Missler - who really brings it home for those of us who were stuck in science.
And why isn’t the term “Judeo -Christian” used so much anymore? OT+NT. Grafting.

Hebrew language relays His Message multi-dimensional format - b/c He is multi-dimensional, multiple dimensions exist and have been proved via quantum equations & CERN (one good thing about CERN) ImageImageImage
Read 8 tweets

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