- Forum >
- Topic: Hebrew >
- "כשאת שותָה קפה את לא ישנה."
34 Comments
is the second person singular used to express a general truth ? As in english ?
I think the equivalent of the generic you is the impersonal plural "כשאת שותים קפה לא ישנים"
that's what I thought too, but I believed that I read somewhere that it was possible with the second person singurlar as well.. I can't remember what lesson it was
Second person singular can be used for impersonal, but only in very informal speaking.
Is כשאת really impersonal? Does it not have the personal את in it? Should the impersonal plural rather be כש שותים קפה לא ישנים ?
Well, not grammatically, but as regards content: You have to work very hard to make a dollar these days or The only place you can get great pizza is in Houghton does not adress you personally, but a general person, a John Doe. The usual way to express this in Standard Hebrew is indeed the impersonal plural, but quite informally, as Yarden mentioned, the English model to express it is possible in Hebrew too.
I was wondering about the correct way of constructing the impersonal in this case. My understanding (guess) is that the proper way is the impersonal plural, כש שותים קפה לא ישנים , while an informal way is כשאת שותָה קפה את לא ישנה , (and I suppose כשאתה שותה קפה אתה לא ישנ ), and that כשאת שותים קפה לא ישנים is neither. Is that correct?
725
A correction. It's כששותים. Also, it's אתה לא ישן (you forgot the nun sofit). As for your last example, it's incorrect, because you can't combine את with שותים. Or was it a typo?
Also, as described in this article, "אַתָּה evidently expresses a relatively interactive orientation, even when uses gererically". So while כְּשֶׁשּׁוֹתִים… sounds more like an scientific fact, כְּשֶׁאַתָּה שׁוֹתֶה… sounds more like an incentive to reduce coffee consumption.
- 96
There is a difference in nikkud (and thus meaning) between the two words: יָשָׁן is an adjective which means old (used to describe an object, as TeribleT mentioned), and יָשֵׁן is a verb, which means "is sleeping"
It's not while sleeping, it's that for many people, caffeine is a stimulant so they can't fall asleep (or so I've heard, It's never kept me up.) (Caffeine doesn't affect everyone, but that's a separate discussion on genetics ...).
- 148
This one came up as a listening exercise, but it doesn't seem to have any sound. Anyone else had an issue with it?
I have found on my PC there sometimes are exercises where the sound doesn't work, so I switched to the app on my Android tablet. Don't have that problem there. Using Chrome on the Android web browser also seems to work fine.
I think it's more כ + ש + את = When that you
כשאת on Reverso: When you / while you
(I'm learning too, so I can't confirm but Google translate and Reverso both had it as "when you") = כשאת \כשאתה \כשאתם \כשאתן
Close, but... "since" originally means "in following times", and came to be used for a cause-and-effect. כש is used for same-time, and I guess is often used for cause-and-effect, as in this example. But the cause-and-effect is very implicit, so I'd say it falls short of a legitimate translation...
