"אתה אוכל סלט עגבניות."
Translation:You are eating a tomato salad.
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So why do you say מרק עגבניה but סלט עגבניות? Is it just how you say it in hebrew or is there some rule behind it?
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I think עגבניות is more common for both ("soup of tomatoes")
Using the single form implies generality ("soup made of the tomato vegetable") and so can be used, but it seems less common. I don't know if I ever heard it with "salad"
It sounds like salahtgvinot. Usually I can hear the separate words, is this just me? Is the first time I couldn't hear the separation. And I speak insanely fast. Like my dad still can't understand me & I've been speaking for decades.
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I clearly hear him say saLAT agvaniOT. I don't see a date on these posts, so you may have done this one very early in your work with Duolingo Hebrew. Either that or they revised the audio.
Can somebody tell me the derivation of עגבניות ? A few languages don't use the original Nahuatl word but not a lot. Interested.
It's actually a fascinating story. Courtesy of Eylon Gilad:
One of the languages that didn't use the Nahuatl word is Italian, which called it "apple of gold" - "pomodoro". Then some French people misunderstood it to mean something with "adore", "an apple of love", and started to use "pomme d'amour" alongside "tomate". Similarly some Germans called it "Liebsapfel" alongside "tomate", and it went together with rumors about it being an aphrodisiac.
At the end of the 19 century, the zionist Rabbi Yechiel Michel Pines was one of a bunch of guys coining Hebrew words like crazy, in the project of reviving the Hebrew language. He translated an agriculture book and needed a Hebrew word for this vegetable. Taking a model from the "love apple", he went to the biblical verb עגב and coined עגבנייה.
This was a bit of a scandal, because עגב goes beyond "love" - it connotes with lust, even with sex (would it be very low of me to point to the Rabbi's name, "Pines"?). Eliezer Ben Yehuda thought it was rude, and pushed for בדורה /badura/, after the Arabic "bandora" which in turn has rolled from our old friend "pomodoro".
But as it turned out Pines's suggestion prevailed, partly perhaps thanks to this song which became immensely popular among the zionists in the 1920's - 30's. The verb עגב is not really in modern use, and most Israelis use the word עגבנייה without suspecting any sexual connotation.
Hebrew doesn’t have cases but I can sort of see where you are coming from.
Hebrew has smikhut compounds consisting of a nismakh and a somekh. Somekh is the second word, so עגבניות here is the somekh. The second word never changes form in smikhut, so you can’t really call it a case. However, it does have the sense “of tomatoes”, so it is vaguely similar to the genitive.
A pattern to help remember... Nahuatl: xitomatl; Spanish: tomate; English: tomato; Portuguese: tomate: French: tomate; German: tomate; Hebrew... agvaniah (עגבניה)