Hebrew Song/Prayer Gripe

[debka_notion]

WHy must Hebrew be so unpredictable with its verbs? It's either overwhelmingly stingy or overly effusive with verb use. And why do people insist on singing songs in Hebrew that leave out all semblance of a meaningly sentence structure? I mean, I'm pretty fond of "Al HaNisim", but it doesn't have any verbs except one that's firmly embedded in a prepositional phrase. ANd if one wanted to understand the last four words (ba'yamim hahem, bazman hazeh) as being a predicate, then shouldn't there be a "she" in there before those words? Maybe it's a failure of my (miniscule) knowledge of Hebrew grammar, but that's how I thought the rule worked. Comments anyone?

Bueler?

Comments

[tovah623.livejournal.com]

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

That makes quite a lot of sense; I hadn't thought of it. Interesting.

[thevortex.livejournal.com]

To add to tovah623's thought, a number of songs are taken out of context. "Ufaratzta," "Od yishama," "Asher bara," to name a few.

The context issue raised by tovah623 also elucidates why the last four words are not quite the predicate, but rather are a part thereof.

And one way to look at "bayamim hahem bazman hazeh" is "in ancient times and in modern times." One of the nice things about the Hebrew language is it's lack of precision. (Discussion upon request, but my fellow hypnotists and I have been discussing this one a lot -- mostly critiquing English...)

Huzzah!

The Vortex

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it makes sense. But why Hebrew/Jewish music has this great taste for taking lyrics/making songs for sets of words without their context/complete sentences, I don't know. I just can't think of any songs like that in English. Maybe because I don't have a similar liturgy to pull from in English..

And don't anyone suggest Gates-of-Prayer-sian English liturgy. That stuff's just icky, mostly.