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rhuForget the annual question of how to transliterate Chanukah. This week we had a real doozy.
Yesterday was the fifeenth day of the month of Sh'vat. That's a two-syllable month name; the first syllable has a schwa as its vowel. (So it's more of a one-and-a-half-syllable word, but let's not make things too complicated.) This is commonly referred to as "The fifteenth of Sh'vat", or in Hebrew -- well, for now I'll transliterate it as "Tu biSh-vat".
What's happening to that second word?
The preposition "of" in this case is represented by the prefix "b'" -- that's a bet with a schwa underneath/following it. So the word should be "b'Sh'vat." But that would result in two consecutive sounded schwas at the beginning of a word, which is impractical to pronounce, so the first schwa transforms into a chirik vowel (like a long ee) and the second schwa reduces to quiescence.
We end up with a word made up of two closed syllables: "beesh" and "vaht".
Yet we English-speakers like to see proper nouns, like the name of a month, capitalized. "Tu Bishvat" looks wrong. So many people fall back to "Tu B'Shvat", and pronounce it that way, with this un-Hebraic schmear of "shv" at the start of the second syllable.
And we overly pendantic prescriptivist sorts see the prefix "b'" and (mindlessly?) apply the English title-case rule of not capitalizing prepositions shorter than five letters.
So we end up with the absurd spelling "Tu biSh-vat".
All for a minor observance that actually only deals with establishing the start of the fiscal year for purposes of allocating tree fruit grown in the biblical land of Israel for computing tithes --- and that, only according to the opinion of the academy of Hillel.
Yesterday was the fifeenth day of the month of Sh'vat. That's a two-syllable month name; the first syllable has a schwa as its vowel. (So it's more of a one-and-a-half-syllable word, but let's not make things too complicated.) This is commonly referred to as "The fifteenth of Sh'vat", or in Hebrew -- well, for now I'll transliterate it as "Tu biSh-vat".
What's happening to that second word?
The preposition "of" in this case is represented by the prefix "b'" -- that's a bet with a schwa underneath/following it. So the word should be "b'Sh'vat." But that would result in two consecutive sounded schwas at the beginning of a word, which is impractical to pronounce, so the first schwa transforms into a chirik vowel (like a long ee) and the second schwa reduces to quiescence.
We end up with a word made up of two closed syllables: "beesh" and "vaht".
Yet we English-speakers like to see proper nouns, like the name of a month, capitalized. "Tu Bishvat" looks wrong. So many people fall back to "Tu B'Shvat", and pronounce it that way, with this un-Hebraic schmear of "shv" at the start of the second syllable.
And we overly pendantic prescriptivist sorts see the prefix "b'" and (mindlessly?) apply the English title-case rule of not capitalizing prepositions shorter than five letters.
So we end up with the absurd spelling "Tu biSh-vat".
All for a minor observance that actually only deals with establishing the start of the fiscal year for purposes of allocating tree fruit grown in the biblical land of Israel for computing tithes --- and that, only according to the opinion of the academy of Hillel.
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Date: 2011-01-22 04:05 am (UTC)