I'm amused

[rhu]

According to Language Log, the Greeks have a sense of humor about their current crisis:

I believe that the usual word for "frog" in modern Greek is batrachos, but all of Greece is referring to the current batrachian horde with the Biblical word tzfardei'a.

ETA: Looks like this was an urban myth based on one newspaper source that may have gotten it wrong. Pity; it would have been a great story if true.

Comments

[42itous.livejournal.com]

That's hilarious! Guess it's a case of the word being different if it can be considered a plague.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

It goes both ways, of course. There's a wonderful album by Keren Peles titled Mabul. The title song has nothing to do with The Flood, but I can't help thinking of it in those terms. TMBG's Flood doesn't have that evocation, but the word Mabul does. I wonder if it works the same way for native Hebrew speakers.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I just posted a comment on LanguageLog about the transliteration error, by the way:

The vowel at the end of צפרדע is a "furtive patach", a פתח גנובה, since it's under an 'ayin. That means that the vowel is pronounced before the consonant, not after, and the transliteration should be tzəfardeya`, not tzfardei'a.

[autotruezone.livejournal.com]

Given that the source of the transliteration was Vos Iz Neias, which (from its name alone) can be assumed to have an Ashkenazi bias, I suspect that the apostrophe was not meant to convey an ayin sound (which Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew don't have), but as a placeholder between two vowel sounds (tzere and patach). You use a "y" for that purpose in your proposed transliteration, but that risks putting too much of a consenental "y" sound between the vowels.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's the point -- since it's a patach genuvah, there isn't a break between the vowels, and there is a diphthong "y" between the vowels.

[autotruezone.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that there was a break between the vowels. It should be a tzere sound followed by a patach sound (followed by an ayin sound, for those who can pronounce it).

What there *shouldn't* be is a consonantal "y" sound between the tzere and patach. Americans have a tendency to put that sound in there, but it doesn't belong. Not "deya", but rather "dea", where the e and a are separate vowels rather than a dipthong (I wish I knew phonetic symbols better). My assumption is that they put the apostrophe where it was not as a break or an intermediate sound between the tzere and the patach, but rather to break up the vowels so that it wouldn't look like one long dipthong (i.e. the same function for which you're using the letter "y", if I understand you correctly).