Shorashim

This post is from way back in March.

FF wanted to know what "וַיֵּבְךְּ" means, and he was not impressed with my translation of "and he cried." So I offered an alternative explanation of "וְהוּא בָּכָה," and FF was totally fine with that. 

Being a little puzzled about why FF was happy to accept a modern Hebrew translation of the Biblical word, but not an English translation, I started to explain that in a shoresh [linguistic root of a word], the letters כּ and כ are interchangeable... Seeing his slightly blank look, I asked FF if he was at all familiar with the concept of shorashim. He was not. 

So I gave FF a bunch of different forms of the word "cry," (he cried, they will cry, to cry, the act of crying, a cry...) and pointed out that all of those "crying" words have a ב or בּ and a כ or כּ in them, so we know those 2 letters are in the shoresh. Before I could get to the point, which is that if we see a word with those 2 letters in that order, that word is probably related to crying, BSM jumped in, saying he has a nice easy trick to figure out the shoresh of any word. 

And with great aplomb, BSM told FF to just take the word in question and say "he did that word yesterday," and whatever pops out of FF's mouth when he does that trick will be the shoresh. Without waiting for a reaction, BSM continued that usually there will be three letters in the shoresh, but sometimes there will be four letters (e.g, גלגל), and sometimes there will be only two  letters (e.g., רץ). And that's all there is to it! And FF was perfectly satisfied.

Whoa. So much for the non-native-Hebrew-speaker trick of taking a word and peeling off all of the prefix-, suffix-, and conjugation-specific letters to see what you're left with, and then adding back any letters that have a tendency fall off of shorashim (I'm looking at you, א, ה, ו, י, נ and anyone else I may have forgotten).

It reminds me of that time years ago and a city away that I asked my manager if the word משפחתון (playgroup) is masculine or feminine, and she very kindly taught me a Useful Trick. "Just take that word and say 'a big noun,'" she explained, "And whichever gender of 'big' you use is the gender of the noun!" I then had to explain to my manager that as someone who didn't learn the language as a child, the whole reason I'm asking for the noun's gender is that I want to know which gender of adjective to pick, and I have no way of magically forcing the correct gender of adjective to just instinctively pop out.

And all of this nerdy talk reminds me of a joke YC told me the other day:

איך מבחינים בין ציפור לציפורה? 

הציפור רץ והציפורה רצה. 

[How do you tell the difference between a male bird and a female bird?

The male bird runs (v., m., pres., sing.), and the female bird runs (v., f., pres., sing.).]

Granted, it's a nerdy joke, but it's funny!