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- "האתלטיות לא יקחו חלק באולימפ…
"האתלטיות לא יקחו חלק באולימפיאדה."
Translation:The athletes will not take part in the Olympics.
12 Comments
Yup. And I find it somewhat sad, despite being a native English speaker, that the uninteresting idiom "take part" has been incorporated into Hebrew.
It is very interesting. I've noticed that there are also a lot of Hebrew idioms in English which were picked up through the English translations of the Bible.
Sometimes these things make me sad, as if the revival of Hebrew was not completed because at some point people started getting lazy and translating word-for-word from European languages, rather than finding authentically Hebrew ways to say things.
You can use משתתף instead of לוקח חלק, there's a genuinely Hebrew way to say it. I agree that it should be included in the lesson.
Interestingly, German and Hungarian also use the "take part" idiom. Well, granted, the latter got it from the former - a large part of its vocabulary was lifted from German like that, but they have since become "genuinely" Hungarian was to say those things.
I would add to this that “athlete” is derived from the Greek “ἀθλητής”. In terms of the history of alphabets, the Greek letter θ (theta) is related to ט, and the Greek letter τ (tau) is related to ת, as evidenced by the names of the letters, their position in the alphabetical order, and maybe even the forms of the letters themselves. But in transliterating words, this correspondence is reversed. For instance, whenever a Hebrew name is written in Greek in the New Testament, ט becomes τ and ת becomes θ. And the same convention is generally followed when a word derived from Greek appears in modern Hebrew, as in אתלט/אתלטית, מתמטיקה, etc. Someday I hope to learn why this reversal happened.
