Friday, February 02, 2007
When the moon is in the seventh house
This has been a year of cosmic confluences. Rosh Hashanah coincided with the autumnal equinox, Rosh Chodesh Tevet (during Chanukah) coincided with the winter solstice, and now Tu Bishvat (yes, that's right, BISHVAT) overlaps not only with Groundhog Day (another winter holiday that looks optimistically to spring) but (as Kol Ra'ash Gadol points out on Jewschool) with Ice Cream For Breakfast Day! Shabbat shalom and chag sameiach!
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I love the shwa fight, but it does not explain why some relative infinitives with the lamed prefix acquire a dagesh kal in the second root letter, apparently following the shwa fight. Perhaps the winning shwa could hang the defeated shwa's head up there as a trophy or something...
ReplyDeleteThere's always a dagesh kal when one of the BGD KFT letters is at the beginning of the word or (relevant to this case) following a sheva nach.
ReplyDeletethat is true following a shva nach, but the shva that wins the shva fight is not a shva nach, but a shva merachef--it is like a shva nach in that it is not vocalic, but it is like a shva na in that it does not give dagesh kal to the letter that follows. This is why it is Tu Bishvat, not Tu Bishbat. (The shva following initial shuruk is also a shva merachef, as is the shva in constructs such as "malchei".)
ReplyDeleteHowever, there is a class of words in which the victorious shva occasions dagesh kal: the majority of the infinitives with lamed prefix.
And here I thought Hebrew was a boring language in terms of linguistic contruction. It turns out that it's pretty boring syntactically, but that's apparently because all the fun happens at the morpheme level....
ReplyDeleteHi, I'm glad you liked and shared the shewa fight video that I made!
ReplyDelete-Chris