The Times They Are Achanging.

I have lived in Israel as an Israeli for 25 years.  As a result, I have witnessed massive changes to Israeli society over this period, slightly more than one generation.  The way of life here is now significantly if not almost completely different than that of the Israel I came to. This change is most easily felt in the small details of life.  I have made a very partial list of then and now.

1.       Israel had one television and no cable system.  Everybody watched the same programs. Today, Israelis have access to an immeasurably greater quantity of channels, but not necessarily a better quality of programs.

2.      Phone lines were hard to get and involved significant waiting time and/or protection.  I walked and made phone calls from the public phone booth, like most people.

3.      The public phone booths themselves used phone tokens called assimonim in Hebrew, coins with a hole and slot in the middle that only were good for the phone.  People walked around with pocket filled with them so as to always be able to make a call and because, curiously, they were considered relatively protected against inflation.

4.      The city buses had no air conditioning.  Apparently, feeling hot was considered normal, not awful as it is today.

5.      The most popular car by far was the Subaru for no clear reason whatsoever.  For years, the brand had the highest resale value of any company.  Today, it is hard to find a Subaru in any parking lot.

6.      The post office had an ink pad for illiterate people to use by “inking” their fingerprint when signing documents.  I suppose that it exists today, but I haven’t seen anybody use it for a long time.

7.      Every Friday afternoon, on the only government station, an amusing rabbi would joyfully mumble a few words about the Shabbat reading and, slowly and clearly, would say “Shabbat Shalom”.  His name escapes me, but I actually went to a wedding conducted by him.  Ah, the days of cheerful rabbis.

8.      At the local grocery store, a macolit in Hebrew, it was common practice for the goods to be behind the desk of the grocer, meaning you had to ask for the item you wanted.  Shopping in one of those places was a real scary challenge for new immigrants.

9.      To the best of my knowledge, I don’t remember any problems finding parking in most places for one basic reason: the average person couldn’t afford a car.

10.   The shekel to dollar exchange rate was 1.5 (as compared to 3.5 today).  Neither makes any sense to me, to tell the truth.

As Bob Hope said, thanks for the memories.

Shabbat Confusion

Israel, as its founding document says, is a Jewish democratic state.  As most of world has experienced, there is a constant tension between those freedom and religion.  For example, many American cities had Sunday laws, similar to the Shabbat by-laws in Israel, closing stores on Sundays, not exactly freedom of occupation.

A tourist travelling in Israel on a Saturday would be forgiven for not quite understanding what exactly Shabbat means.  Depending on the place, the roads and shopping centers may be completely empty or packed to the gills.  Is Saturday a day of rest or not?  The answer is as unclear as in regards to other aspects of Shabbat behavior.  For example, is it okay to have a child’s birthday party on Saturday keeping in mind that some of families keep the Sabbath?  When my daughter was small, parties were during the week.  Today, I am not so sure.  Many but all people avoid talking about money on Saturday, at least with strangers.  Most Sabras do not call people they don’t know on Saturday, but most will use a telephone.  Workers strive to avoid working on Saturday to spend time with family and friends. In other words, Shabbat is a day of rest (from work at least) but not a restful day for many Jews.

Shabbat remains different from the other days of the week but not in any uniform way.  While some people keep the Sabbath according to the book, others less religious keep some of the spirit out of respect or self-interest.  In this sense, Israel is Jewish and democratic, every Jew “respecting” the Sabbath in his/her own way.

Non-trite eating

To eat is such a nondescript verb, flatly describing the physical action of putting food in your mouth and swallowing.  The English language with variety of roots and structure has countless more precise ways to describe the context and richness of that necessary act of nourishment.

Some terms add the element of time.  You have breakfast in the morning and brunch between 10-2, often on a weekend day.  You lunch (but not always have lunch) in the afternoon followed by an afternoon snack, at least for growing children.  You have dinner in the evening or a supper later in the evening dependent on whether you eat American or European style.  Of course, you can snack between meals and nosh at any time.  Depending on our activity, you may have a late night snack to hold you until the morning, when it all begins again.

Other terms add quantity. Picking at your food meets you are not very hungry. A light meal is at any time but in moderation.  If you have a bite, you eat enough to meet your energy needs as is grabbing some chow. By contrast, if you scarf your food, you eat fast while pigging out and stuffing your face imply maxing out your calorie content.

The purpose of the occasion can also be expressed in the verb.  To do lunch is meet someone for the lunch, where the main function of the mouth is actually to talk.  If you are going to have a coffee or a tea with someone, you will probably eat something with your hot beverage but the biscuit is not the purpose of sitting down.  If you munch in front of the television or after smoking marijuana, you may not even taste the snacks. By contrast, to dine is to consciously choose to enjoy food.  Even more serious, if you intend to feast, the food is the prime attraction as in a holiday dinner or birthday celebration. 

So, in some ways the word eat is like the word thing: it says so much that it says so little.

Alphabet Soup

Learning languages sometimes involves learning different languages or, for languages using the same letters, different names.  For example, the letter e is said differently in English and French.  In further consideration of the matter, another interesting fact of letter names is that the same sound often has a meeting of its own, whether or not spelled in the same manner.  Of the twenty six letters in English, eighteen of the sounds are also words.  I identify the following as words in the dictionary:

A – Aye, I have a dollar.

B – A bee can be very busy.

C – I see your bet and raise you five dollars

G- Gee I am sorry for spilling your drink.

I – I use my eye to see.

J – The jay is a beautiful bird.

L – When in Chicago, you can take the el.

M – The em is a type of dash as compared to the

N –the en, the difference between them almost nobody knows.

O- Oh, I forgot my keys.

P-Beer makes me have to pee.

Q- Standing in queue is not my favorite activity

R- You are what you are.

(S) – Yiddish – Esse mein kindt – eat, my child)

T- Before going to the tee, we’ll have some tea.

U- You know about this one.

X-With the popularity of divorce, there are many exes out there.

Y- I don’t know why that is true.

The neglected letters are d, e, f, h, s, v, w, and z.

In a more polyglot vein, the Hebrew alphabet also has it sense – able side:

Bet – as in stupid in French, bēte

Hey – as Hey kid, wake up!

Vav – a hook in Hebrew because of the shape of the letter

Zi’in – the male sexual organ in Hebrew

Het – a sin in Hebrew

Tet – A head (anatomical) in French, tēte, as well as a famous Vietnamese month

Kaf – As in put your hand over your mouth when you cough

Mem – the same, mēme, in French

Nun – as in that famous western, High Noon

Ayin – an eye in Hebrew

Peh – mouth in Hebrew

Tzadik – a righteous one in Hebrew

Shin – as in don’t kick me in the shin

Sin – as in a Jew eating a ham and cheese sandwich on Yom Kippur

Next time, I’ll get back to words.

If you have any additions or comments, feel free to make them.

Of Mice and Men Linguistically

The Canard Enchaîné (to which I am a proud subscriber) edition of December 11, 2013 published an article entitled “Do you speak franglish.”  This article was in response to an article in the Parisien of December 9, 2013 decrying the large scale entry of English expressions into French.  The gist of the Canard Enchaîné article was to question why, since English has no problem with French borrowings, the French should have a problem with the English language imports.  Among the cited examples of Frenchisms in English are matinee, je ne sais quoi, deluxe, cul-de-sac, petite (size), and bra.

This issue is not new.  I am reminded me of the Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which correctly noted that the upper class spoke a Russian that was strongly French, to the point of barely being able to have a conversion in pure Russian, like many Israeli Russians today.  To the best of my knowledge, this weakness in their native tongue did not seem to bother the vast majority of Russians, poor and rich alike.  In Israel when the Technion was founded, German was the mother language of most of the professors and was almost declared the language of teaching, not Hebrew.  Today in Germany, many job interviews are conducted in English, which I somehow find shocking given how important national pride is often connected with language. So, the matter of the acceptability of linguistic mercantilism, i.e. not allowing imports, is far from straight-forward.

It appears that countries that are secure in their cultural identity have no problem allowing foreign words to enrich their lives.  The expression it is no skin off my back would seem to apply.  By contrast, more insecure cultures, including the French in my opinion as they insist too much on their superiority, fret over the loss of linguistic “purity”.  In response to the Parisien article, the “language of Molière” disappeared long before Macdo and en direct live arrived in France.  Is modern French any less expressive than 17^th century French?  Is modern English less rich than Shakespearean English?  They are clearly different and include words from much wider sources.  However, each language is clearly distinct from each other in form and identity. 

It takes a confident person to accept and embrace change and novelty.   Likewise, it takes a confident culture to accept that foreign words can enrich the existing vocabulary, even if a native word already exists.  As English has proven, there is no problem being able to use tiredness and fatigue.  Neither word has become extinct due to its competition.  France has been struggling with the domination of English for some now.  I believe that while English will not disappear, nor will French, albeit a bit a franglished.  Vive la difference.

Computer Program Verbalization

Many years ago, when I operated a photocopy machine (sounds funny, but true) at a large legal office in Los Angeles, the Xerox technician would correct us if we dared say the term “to Xerox a copy”, immediately reminding us that the term was to make a Xerox copy.  The reason for this insistence was the fear of over-identification of a company with a process or products, specifically the unique company name would become a public domain item, as in aspirin, originally a specific product.

Today, this concern has disappeared, especially in the software field.  People, including non-computer nerds, regularly google for information, photoshop their picture to eliminate the red eyes, and skype with their relatives abroad, or at least understand what these expressions mean.  Note that these verbs are not capitalized although they are registered trademarks nor does their trademark holder seem upset by their use.

Similarly, social media application developers love that people can icq each other, twitter a message to an athlete or just a friend, or chat by writing a text, not sitting and talking like it used to be.

These extreme successes make developers of other software drool. I am sure the Ways’ new owner would just love to have it replace the verb to gps.  Can you imagine the ecstasy of Microsoft if Windows became a synonym for panacea (like Ford’s Edsel once signified a completely lemon of a car)? Yahoo’s stock would reach the moon if to yahoo something meant provide a complete service.  Not everybody is so lucky, alas.

So, in a world when anybody can rent a limousine or tuxedo and even afford caviar from time to time, the symbol of ultimate success may, rather ironically, be found a two line entry in a dictionary. To paraphrase that Frank Sinatra song, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere……”

Wintery language thoughts

As I sit writing in my home of Karmiel in the Galilee with the unfamiliar sight of snow covered the hills around me and a crispy temperature of 2 degrees centigrade, just slightly above freezing for those living in Fahrenheit countries, my thoughts wander off to weather terms.  Specifically, I consider how each language expresses those common or not-so-common winter phenomena that have to be expressed in words, especially by the news media.

English, being a root-rich language, prefers the precise single word.  It is cold, note the verb to be, but most other terms have their own specific verb form: it snows; it rains; it hails. English weather needs no help.

Nor does French. “Il fait froid”, this time using the verb faire, to have, but il neige; il pleut; il grēle.  This one-verb form makes leaning the terms much easier, eliminating the mistaken helping verb.  Of course, Americans will often say “Il est froid”, the literal translation of the English construction, but the French will understand that if they so chose.

Aside from the cold term, the Russian language goes places. The single term  [holodno] expresses the three word English phrase.  By contrast, in the Russian winter, идет снег [idyot sneg]; идет джодь [idyot djod]; идет град [idyot grad].   In all the cases, the weather, whether it is snow, rain, or hail, goes, presumably downwards.

In Israel, these phenomena clearly travel towards the ground.  When זה קר [ze kar], meaning it is cold, and ורד שלג  [yored sheleg],  יורד גשם][yored geshem], or  יורד ברד [yored barad], the snow, rain and hail literally drop.  Since we don’t know get enough of the first two, it makes sense they can be called “drop in the bucket”. 

So, if you are lucky enough to be watching the weather from the warmth of your home (with the electricity working), think about how your language expresses the complex act of precipitation.