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- "היא לא רוצָה שום דבר מלבד אב…
25 Comments
I figured it out. Click "report problem" and one of the options is, "my answer should be accepted."
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Love this explanation of שום דבר - garlic talk חחחחח :-P
David F. James, B.E. from University of Montserrat (2010)
Answered Jan 11, 2019
Shum is the Hebrew word for garlic. In the phrase ‘shum davar’ it literally means ‘garlic talk’, or to put it into understandable English, speech that is trivial, unimportant, and a waste of time.
Funny, but I doubt if the two שוםs are etymologically related. According to Even Shoshan they are not.
This is akward in English. Normally we'd say: she doesn't want anything ... or she wants for nothing. I even searched "wants nothing except" and it wasn't pretty. It was grammar from 19th century texts and foreign language translations. There were few links... Because it's not modern English.
It's not THAT weird. Also "modern English" is exactly the kind of English you find in those older texts, going all the way back to Shakespeare. You must mean it isn't contemporary English, with which I still disagree.
Yes, just add מ, like this: חוץ מאבא שלה. In fact it's more common in spoken Hebrew, מלבד is a tad formal.
I wrote "She does want nothing except for her father" and it was deemed incorrect. But "does want" = "wants" and "father" = "dad", so where should it be wrong?!
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm quite sure you cannot replace "wants" with "does want", except in very special contexts and intentions that can't apply here.
Can someone please break down the phrase שום דבר מלבד and explain what it means word by word? I know that together it means "anything except" or "nothing except for," but I don't know what each word means by itself.
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Could someone explain the לא? In English this would make it a double negative, I'm assuming that's not the case here? And would leaving it out be wrong?
Some people call it double negative, but I think it's not exactly that. In modern Hebrew שום does not have a clear meaning in itself; it's pretty much like English "any", but only in negative sentences. So you can't omit the לא, but you can omit the שום (and sound more formal).
