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- "זה כיף!"
64 Comments
766
It seems that 'כיף' is transcribable into "keif". However, the voice seems to pronounce the vowel as a simple /e/, a monophthong. Is this /ei/ > /e/ a common process in colloquial Israeli Hebrew?
766
Is it true that this is typical of a more Sephardic or Mizrahi pronunciation, with the /ei/ version being more Ashkenazi?
The nikkud צירה originally represented probably some form of long /e/, maybe the diphtong /ei/, I'm not sure. In Ashkenazy pronounciation up to the 20th century it was /ei/, and it used to be a known mark of immigrants from eastern Europe to Israel in the first part of the 20th century when they talked Hebrew.
In recent decades צירה is invariably a simple /e/. Where the צירה is followed by a consonant Yod, as in "בני אדם" = /bney adam/ = "humans", we retain the consonant or diphtong. The only exception that jumps to my mind is the "בית" in construct form, /beyt/, which is often contracted to /bet/ but it's still normal to hear /beyt/.
Now כיף is a strange case in itself. It was borrowed from Arabic, where it's pronounced /kef/, and has always been pronounced /kef/ by Hebrew speakers as far as I know. Why was the spelling with the Yod chosen? My guess is that to distinguish it from כף = /kaf/ = spoon, and adopting the Arabic spelling that has Ya; I believe that indeed the Arabic reached /kef/ by contracting /keif/ or /kaif/.
as per this post in particular: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7388681/Hebrew-Time-9-Reading-without-vowels
2012
If you learn to read Hebrew with vowels it will be much more difficult for you to read modern Hebrew texts such as books, newspapers, road signs etc' which are written almost always without Nikkud. That's the reason they left it out of this course,
660
BezalelP, I learned to read Hebrew with vowels before I started Duolingo. If I had not, I would have been completely lost when I started. But, already knowing how to read Hebrew and how the vowel system works, gave me a strong foundation. I then had no difficulty whatsoever transferring over to the non-voweled writing.
Your course English-Hebrew – Ghislaine182838
I would like to bring to your attention a problem with this course that I have been taking for the last nine weeks. The individual question sections are well designed but as I do not have a Hebrew keyboard many of the answers to the requested translations rely on the “Use Word Bank” that provides the Hebrew symbol.
However, it is sometimes the case that towards the end of a section you require a English-Hebrew translation without providing a Hebrew keyboard. At the same time the question pages states that if you do not provide an answer “you lose all the points of the section.” A very annoying result after putting a lot of effort to answering all the earlier questions.
Can you not provide Hebrew symbol keyboard?
801
Why is בית not pronounced beet, but it's bayit? Simply put, י is not consistently pronounced as "ee" or "i".
2012
Because י is not the only vowel in this word, and its pronunciation depends on the nikkud of the previous letter. For example, the word בית with nikkud looks like this: בַּיִת with a Patach under the ב, and so the י's i sound will continue the a sound of the ב. In the word ביט (bit, as in digital storage unites), the ב' has a Hiriq and therefor the י will get the stronger i sound.
I think the interesting question, though, is the reverse one - given that the pronunciation is /kef/, why is it spelled כיף and not כף? The pronunciation clearly came before the spelling, when this word was borrowed from Arabic into Hebrew slang. Spelling was probably chosen only years later, when the word became so established in speaking that newspaper editors started to show it. Why did they choose to spell it with a yod? Maybe because in Arabic there is /y/ in the root? I doubt it, because I can hardly imagine these editors digging into Arabic, or giving that much attention to the question at all. An easier guess is that it's simply to avoid ambiguity with /kaf/, spoon.
801
Because "funny" is an adjective, that means something different than כיף which is a noun, meaning "fun".
660
Two different words. In Spanish/Italian fun = divertido/divertimento. Funny = grasioso/comico.