User talk:Msh210/Archive/צמה

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צמה#Usage notes

Really? I've never heard anyone talk like that — in my experience the stress is always on the first syllable (tzáma, káma, gára, etc.). What you describe, is it an old-fashioned thing? —Ruakh_TALK 17:26, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Update: Hmm. Lewis Glinert's Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar, Third Edition (a well-respected grammar of Modern Hebrew) gives every indication that the stress is always on the first syllable (as in my experience), but stops just short of saying so. It's weird. It's very explicit that "in one-syllable verbs, stress never falls on the past or future tense suffixes", but it doesn't make that statement for the present-tense feminine singular. The present-tense conjugation table indicates stress on the first syllable, and the text afterward says "Stress here is peculiar: although the suffixes look just like adjective suffixes, colloquial usage stresses the fem. sing. as קָֽמָה instead of קָמָֽה. The result is that ‘she got up’ and ‘she gets up’ are both הִיא קָֽמָה." (It actually uses over-hanging arrows instead of metegs and color effects, but I don't know a good way to do that here.) So it never suggests that it's ever pronounced otherwise, except for that odd phrase "colloquial usage". —Ruakh_TALK 22:03, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I know the distinction from Tanach. In Genesis there are two verses with the phrase רחל באה; I'm sure you can find them. The verbs have different emphases, and the translations are different: see Rashi. If the usage note only holds for archaic usage (not obsolete, as it's still in use in liturgical settings), then I guess it should say so: I didn't know that. (That seems like an odd distinction to drop from speech, inasmuch as it's the only distinction that differentiates the tenses. I mean, things merge in language when there's no need for them to remain separate, no? But here there is.)—msh210℠ 16:09, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

It's Genesis 29:6 and 29:9 [1].—msh210℠ 16:21, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

That's interesting, thanks! Re: "things merge in language when there's no need for them to remain separate, no?": I don't know. It seems (from my limited knowledge) that things basically merge whenever they feel like it, and if it turns out the distinction is important, then speakers find a different way to make it. For example, when "thou" merged into "you", it led (eventually) to periphrastic constructions like "you guys" and "y'all" (and even "all y'all"). French has dropped so many consonants and vowels that it gets these things all the time; for example, Latin "hō die" ("this day") eventually got reduced to just "hui", such that French speakers had to upgrade it to (deprecated template usage) aujourd'hui, which is the modern word for "today". BTW, I assume that even in the Tanakh, "tzam" has the ambiguity that "tzáma" has nowadays? Or did it distinguish patakh from kamatz? —Ruakh_TALK 18:40, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the examples. yeah, tzam is the same in both tenses (with a kamatz). The same rule (for masc. and fem.) holds for other binyan-paal words with a triliteral root whose second letter is vav or yod: kam, kamá, káma; shar, shará, shára; etc.—msh210℠ 18:44, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

See also Rashi to Genesis 15:17 [2].—msh210℠ 19:24, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! BTW, I was thinking about it, and another example like this is the loss of cases in many languages, including both English and Hebrew (though in Hebrew it happened so long ago that we have no record of it; we only know because of languages like Classical Arabic that retained the case endings into historical times). Old English nouns had four to five cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and sometimes instrumental), but even though they were very important to the meaning of a sentence, they all eventually disappeared. (Well, except the genitive; we no longer have a genitive case on nouns, but it didn't disappear, in that the modern possessive clitic -'s was generalized from some of the old genitive case endings.) The main result was a fossilized word order; we're now a lot stricter about where the various verb arguments get positioned in a sentence. (IIRC, in Old English, if one of the verb arguments was coordinated, like in "she and I left", then the second part of the coordination would frequently be postponed till the end, like "she left and I", or something like that. We stopped doing that once we could no longer tell which of the verb arguments was coordinated.) —Ruakh_TALK 20:10, 4 March 2009 (UTC)