"האוכל טעים!"
Translation:The food is tasty!
31 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
971
Generally, Delicious is used for something you like a LOT, where tasty is something you like a bit. I think apples are tasty, but my grandma's apple pie is DELICIOUS. To put it another way, I'd be a lot less likely to be emphatic about something being tasty than something being delicious, although both are positive reactions.
- 310
I agree with Will Christopherson (will_do), and would think of "טעים" for tasty and "טעים מאוד" for delicious.
Would that be a common way to make that distinction, or would most Israelis just say "טעים" and use voice inflection or body language for that distinction?
b003 rich739183
We can say טעים מאוד, and of course we have a host of other words to express emphatic delight (though none of my following suggestion is special to food). מעולה is pretty useful, and then you can turn to cutting edge slang at the risk of sounding awkward in a couple years: מדהים, מהמם, פיצוץ, פגז, חבל על הזמן.
Amazing! "okhel" for food in Hebrews sounds just like the "akel" for food in Arabic! :)
- 310
Hebrew and Arabic inherit their similarities naturally from their shared Semitic-language roots. Here's one quick read on the subject:
https://www.globalizationpartners.com/2016/06/12/connections-between-arabic-and-hebrew/
Just as that article mentions similarities between the Arabic words for the names of the two languages, here are the Hebrew words for them:
עברית, ערבית
The first is "Ivrit", meaning "Hebrew"; the second is "Aravit", meaning "Arabic".
b001 rich739183
When do we pronounce the definite article ה as ha- / ah- / hé-( I think this one passed before, but I'm not sure)
?
Always "ha". The Hebrew h sound is pretty weak, so can sound like "a" at times.
In "proper" speech it can be "he" before guttural consonants (ע/ח), but no one says it like that unless they're trying to be very formal.
Apparently the singlular is tah-eem but the plural is tay-ee-meem. Any rule or explanation for why the vowel elongates (why it is not tah-ee-meem)?
We'll have to go back 2000 or 2500 years back, when Hebrew speakers had long and short vowels.
The /a/ in /ta-'IM/ טעים was a long vowel. It would require emitting a lot of air. When adding another syllable for the suffix, /ta-'i-MIM/, one had to be economical and spare on the air of the first syllable, to preserve air for the last. So the first vowel was shortened, in fact to the shortest vowel Hebrew had, the נע שווא - /t(e)-'i-MIM/, where the /(e)/ is like the "dic" in "medicine". I'm over dramatizing, but I think similar phenomena are known in many languages.
Now in modern Hebrew we lost the vowel length distinction, the the שווא נע landed in this case as a full blown /e/ sound, /te-'i-MIM/; ironically, the /e/ ended up just as long as the /a/ it was meant to shorten, but it no longer disturbs the Hebrew speakers. Then we lost the consonant ע, and the two vowels from each side of it merged to a diphthong. So what you hear in the singular is /taIM/, and in the plural - /tei-MIM/. In any case, there is certainly no elongation.
- 310
Greg Meyer (Erlenmeyer71), the masculine singular begins with the long kamatz vowel; the feminine singular and both plurals begin with the shva, which I believe is considered shorter and for which the first syllable is usually transliterated te or t'. We'll have to wait for an expert to confirm this and explain the reason. Here are the 4 forms with nikud:
טָעִים, טְעִימָה, טְעִימִים, טְעִימוֹת
b010 rich739183
Why not sth. like האוכל היא/הוא טעים? Could not this sentence here also just mean "the tasty food"?
- 1422
No. What you wrote means the same thing as the sentence above. And it should be הוא since אוכל is masculine.
Other examples:
The tasty food - האוכל הטעים.
Tasty food - אוכל טעים.
Is "תעים" pronounced /taim/ or /ta'im/ (with a glottal stop between the two vowels)?
ta’im has the global stop.
And like all glottal stops, Hebrew speakers more often than not omit them.