"הילדה אוכלת אורז."
Translation:The girl is eating rice.
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The word for "rice" in Portuguese is "arroz", which sounds a lot like "rice" in Hebrew, dos anybody know if these words are related?
Yep! The oldest reconstituted root is Old Persian "vrinǰi" . That gave rise to Persian "گرنج", Arabic "رُزّ", and Ancient Greek "ὄρυζᾰ". That Ancient Greek word in turn gave Hebrew "אורז", Arabic "أَرُزّ" (yep, those are two separate borrowings), and Latin "oryza" (later "risus"). The Latin word is the root of most Western European words for rice: English "rice", German "Reis", Italian "riso", French "riz". But the Portuguese/Spanish/Ladino "arroz" actually came via Arabic "أَرُزّ".
If you believe Wikipedia, Mesolithic Greece started in 13,000 BC and ended in 7,000 BC.
As for when Hebrew started, there’s plenty of debate about that, so it cannot be pinned down definitively because the answer lies in prehistoric times (An era before written records).
I can't quite figure out the purpose for the vav in the last word. Does aleph-vav together indicate the O vowel? And doesn't it need a diacritic mark then?
Yes. The aleph is basically the vowel carrier, and the vav marks the o vowel.
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In both words - אוכלת and אורז - the vav alone represents the O vowel. In different words the vav can represent the U vowel, such as in אולי ("ulai" maybe/perhaps) and אולם ("ulam" a hall such as a dance hall or a wedding hall). So the alef does not determine the sound of the vowel represented by the vav.
The vav is an interesting letter with multiple uses, adding complexity to the language and challenges to our studies.
