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- "פרות ופירות."
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I have a question. Why does the vav sound "hu" in this example? I thought it sounded "ve" when it was and.
It's not quite so simple I'm afraid. In colloquial Hebrew it would just be "parot veperot", but in this case it is pronounced carefully by the voice actor (news readers and so on would also pronounce it this way), as "parot ufeirot".
To keep it as brief as possible, you can pronounce vav as u, whenever:
**It is followed by "bump" letters: ב, ו, מ, פ (these in turn change to their "weak" pronunciation: b becomes v and p becomes f)
Eg. u-vasar (and meat) ובשר
u-ma (and what) ומה
u-varod (and pink) ווורוד
**It is followed by a shva vowel. Eg. u-gvina וגְבינה
unless you want to work on the national radio, you can say "ve" every time. nobody uses to "hu" sound :)
So this is the sole time where it will "start with an "f" sound, when it's got a vav in the front? (aside from aforementioned slang: like פרחה frekha - like in the lider/hadad song "In The Heat of Tel Aviv", ( בחום של תל אביב).
Also, tangential, but I saw a mem, not mem sofit, at the end of a word. It was a song lyric & clearly a loanword, is this a misspelling, a mistake, or purposeful because it's sacrilegious? גאדדאמ, I think it was... (Chen Aharoni w/the Ultras, singing: let's dance). ( חן אהרוני והאולטראס, בואי נרקוד )
The letters ב, כ, פ in the beginning of words take their soft form (/v/, /kh/, /f/) not only after -ו, but also after ל- and כ- used as prepositions. This will probably come later in the course.
This is only formal Hebrew, though. In spoken Hebrew we keep the hard pronouciation (/b/, /k/, /p/) after ו- and ל-, and we would have kept it also after כ- is we would have still used this preposition at all... The formal pronounciation is still used in speech, though (as well as the כ- preposition), in quite a bunch of set phrases.
Now, to גאדדאמ. Your post is the first time I've seen this word written in Hebrew letters, in either spelling, and the first time I've heard this word used by Hebrew speakers, and the second time I've seen letters written with their non-final form on purpose - the first was in some poems of the great poet Avot Yeshurun, who had this whim (or poetic means).
Surprised, I Google searched it: https://www.google.co.il/search?rlz=1CAHPZR_enIL818&biw=1422&bih=681&ei=FCbOW_DHBMeDgAalv7n4Aw&q=%D7%92%D7%90%D7%93%D7%93%D7%90%D7%9E+-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A1&oq=%D7%92%D7%90%D7%93%D7%93%D7%90%D7%9E+-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A1&gs_l=psy-ab.3...28597.31761..32088...0.0..0.250.1637.0j8j2......0....1..gws-wiz.......35i304i39j0i13j0i13i30j0i8i13i30.6Kn15MNh3lg. 205 hits to this "wrong" spelling, excluding the song you quoted, which is very few but more than גאדדאם with a whopping 9 hits. I don't have a clue why people choose to write it like this. It's a cutting edge slang, to be sure, and my very wild guess is that those people feel it looks wilder this way.
Why is מ a bump letter? It doesn't have another pronunciation, only "m", unlike the other three
bump letters have nothing to do with dual pronunication, it's just the consonants that are pronunced with closed lips.
The four letters בומ"פ - when a word begins with one of them, and the vav of "and" attaches to the word, it's one of the cases where the vav is pronounced /u/ instead of /ve/ by the formal rules (in spoken language, probably mostly in set phrases).
When the vav is pronounced this way, is there any way to tell by listening if it means "cows and fruit" or "cows or fruit?"
Okay, this may be one of the weirdest sentences I've seen on Duolingo. Cows and fruit seem like strange bedfellows!
You know, I never have. Cows are a bit too drooly for me to have a desire to hand feed them, to be honest LOL
Fruit is a mass noun in formal English, at least in Britain. Fruit is a legit translation.
"Fruit" in English is a collective noun, so can be used to refer also to a bunch of apples and bananas. "Fruits" is used only to refer to different kinds of fruits ("we sell 9 fruits"). In Hebrew פירות can refer to a bunch of apples.
Prononciation of " the fruits is not right ,it should be prononced perot and not ferot
No, the formal way is as he says it. The basic word is /perot/, but after ו ("and") and other attached prepositions it becomes /ferot/ (similarly all words beginning with /p/).
In spoken Hebrew we don't have this change, and we also don't change /ve/ to /u/, so it would be /parot ve-pe(y)rot/. (Some speakers say the /y/, some don't, some say it very shortly).
Fruit is a mass noun in formal English, at least in Britain. Fruit is a legit translation.
