Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 December 9

= December 9 =

Hebrew text in image needs translation


The adjacent image is used at Anti-LGBT rhetoric, translated as "God hates lechery". The file page says it's an "anti-gay" poster, but the connection isn't obvious to a non–Hebrew speaker. Could someone fluent in Hebrew please translate the rest? Thanks. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:31, 9 December 2022 (UTC)


 * It's two posters side by side, where the large text reads Elokim sone zima, where Elokim is a euphemistic misspelling for Elohim "God" (which I always find a bit strange, but is done in certain religious circles), while zima doesn't necessarily specifically refer to homosexuality. The first line of smaller text is about "The antisemitic parade of the abomination". AnonMoos (talk) 03:54, 9 December 2022 (UTC) 03:52, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * OK. What does it say about the "parade of the abomination"? I assume this refers to Gay Pride, but what are the exact words? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:03, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * It means:
 * The anti-Semitic abomination parade
 * under the protection of the High Court against G*d
 * And millions of Jews are crying all over the world
 * According to the caption in the article on the Hebrew Wikipedia it refers to a pride parade held near Tel Aviv University. --Lambiam 07:29, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Lambiam -- Thanks for doing the rest of it (it would have taken me more work with a dictionary than I wanted to do to translate the 2nd and 3rd lines), but you kind of left out the second neged, which means that bokhim is presumably a participle: "and against millions of Jews [who are] crying..." etc. AnonMoos (talk) 22:57, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Considering that there are only about twenty million Jews around the world, the "millions of Jews are crying" statement is probably a gross exaggeration. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:34, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
 * If this refers to a pride parade, it should be made clear in the caption in the article. --Lambiam 06:04, 9 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Tel Aviv gay pride parade 2007 cropped.jpgently, the 2007 Tel Aviv Pride was held on 8 June 2007. The poster image is dated 5 June 2007, making it indeed very plausible they were posted in protest to the upcoming parade. --Lambiam 07:48, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The deliberate misspelling of Elohim is related to the broader concept in Orthodox Judaism of "building a fence around the Torah" which mandates an exceptionally strict separation between the observant religious world and the secular world. The best known example is the refusal to even attempt to pronounce the Tetragrammaton, which is considered God's real name, and which consists of four consonants without vowels. Secular Jews may spell out yud-hay-vav-hay and others may speculate about pronunciations like Yahwey or Jehovah. But Orthodox Jews believe that the name was only pronounced by the High Priests in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem destroyed by the Romans exactly 1950 years ago, and that it is a terrible sin to even try to pronounce it today, since the Temple no longer stands. The problem is that the Tetragrammaton occurs many times in the Torah which must be read aloud in synagogues in an annual cycle. The solution is a euphemism. Whenever the Tetragrammaton appears in the text, the reader says "Adonai" instead, which means "Lord". That is an entirely different word. It is as if you were reading a text out loud, and whenever "George Washington" was written, you pronounced "Theodore Roosevelt" instead. As time went by, Adonai itself grew to became an extremely holy term that was no longer used in everyday speech, and so many other names for God were substituted, including Elohim which also appears in the Torah. One problem with Elohim is that it is a plural term which kind of implies polytheism and Judaism prides itself on monotheism. Hence the urge to misspell the word. This is why, when writing in English, "God" will be rendered as "G*d", and "San Francisco" will be rendered as "S Francisco". "San", after all, is a reference to a Christian saint, and Christian city names are taboo. Coca-Cola is a kosher beverage, but an Orthodox Jew, even if very thirsty on a very hot day, will never order a Coke at McDonald's. Somebody, after all, might look through the window and assume that the observant Jew was eating a non-kosher cheeseburger, which would be a terrible scandal and horrific sin. Cullen328 (talk) 09:27, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * To wander perhaps further off-topic - why has a new Temple not been built, with new High Priests appointed? Is the tradition considered forever broken? 199.208.172.35 (talk) 15:30, 9 December 2022 (UTC)


 * 199.208.172.35 -- The Byzantines had anti-Jewish policies, and were not about to hand over the site of the former Temple to the Jews, and then whatever the Romans and Byzantines had built on the site was destroyed in the catastrophic Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, and soon afterward the Muslims conquered the weakened Persian empire and much of the weakened Byzantine empire and built the Dome of the Rock on the site. There have been some speculations about the "Red Heifer", but rebuilding the Temple is really not at all realistic (trying to do it would be a good way to start a war)... AnonMoos (talk) 16:16, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has been the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock for about 1600 years. There is an organization called the Temple Mount and Eretz Yisrael Faithful Movement that proposes to rebuild the Temple but World War III would be a likely outcome. Cullen328 (talk) 16:33, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I assume that building somewhere else is out of the question. I'll go read some of those articles, thanks for the pointers! 199.208.172.35 (talk) 17:12, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Now, I don't remember the exact title, but I think some North American author wrote a detective story in which it was decided that a reborn Israel should be placed in the Canadian boondocks where hardly anyone else lived, and the main language should be the "bourgeois" Yiddish, instead of resurrected Hebrew. Well, from a secular agnostic point of view, it felt as a proposal that would have saved a lot of trouble... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:07, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You may be thinking of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. (It was Alaska rather than Canada.) Deor (talk) 01:04, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's it, though some of my details have been wrong... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:58, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Apparently some 19th century members of the Reform movement did advocate for establishing a New Jerusalem elsewhere. In, uh, Berlin. 97.113.177.161 (talk) 03:13, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Well, this was way before that moustached struggling Austrian artist failed his art classes, so I guess it sorta made sense at the time... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:14, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Cullen328 -- I can understand them building fences around the actual Tetragrammaton, but altering words which are not the Tetragrammaton has always seemed a bit strange to me. It's like Homer Simpson changing "Jesus" to "Jebus", except done by actual religious scholars. AnonMoos (talk)
 * Gosh, oh golly gee, it is not just Homer Simpson who behaves that frigging way. Heck! Cullen328 (talk) 16:33, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Cullen328 -- "Gosh" and "Golly" are what is known as "minced oaths". They are not normally used as substitutes for the word "God" as a noun (as opposed to an interjection), nor are they normally used in serious religious contexts. AnonMoos (talk) 22:58, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't it be curious if a scholar wrote, "Not all the founders acknowledged the Bible as the revealed word of Gosh."? --Lambiam 19:38, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You bet'cha by Golly Wow! 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:07, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The true reason for replacing the H by K is as follows. According to Deuteronomy 12 2-4: "Ye shall utterly destroy all the places in which they served their gods...and you shall abolish their name. Ye shall not do so to the Lord your God ". Accordingly, Jewish law does not allow to erase/cancel God's names, which are actually seven holy names, one of which is the name written in the first verse of the Bible. In spite of the original prohibition that has referred to erasure/cancelling only, religious jews were afraid to even write down (e.g. in pencil) any of those (seven) holy names, because any text written down (e.g. in pencil) may be erased/cancelled by mistake, so they began replacing some letters in those holy names when being written down (e.g. in pencil). Replacing the H by K was one of the most popular options, because of the similarity between both letters in Hebrew. So when a religious jew read such a name written on a paper, they read it with K as it was written, so they got accustomed to say Elokim even when not reading anything. Anyway, the original prohibition was not about writing but rather about erasure/cancelling only (besides pronouncing the tetragrammation which is another matter). Hope this helps. 147.236.152.145 (talk) 16:36, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * 147.236.152.145 -- I'm sure that they're motivated by the best of intentions, but if I ever met someone who deliberately used a fake name of God out loud, it might be difficult for me not to wonder what it is that they're really worshipping (I have a somewhat similar problem with "Jehovah", except that most of the Jehovah-utterers are merely ignorant)... AnonMoos (talk) 22:11, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Since the text doesn't explicitly mention gay people, it seems like a stretch to use it to illustrate ant-LGBT rhetoric. So I've removed the image. Thanks for all the input. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 16:35, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Naturalized Israeli and veteran Wikimedian here to declare: condemning the Pride Parade is absolutely known as anti-LGBT and a painful public conflict recurring annually in Israeli cities for over a decade. The strictly observant Jews who use the term "abomination" are using their strongest language that dehumanizes the subjects. Read about the Haredi ("ultra-orthodox") man who after serving most of a 12-year prison sentence went on to repeat the stabbing of Pride Parade participands after advocating that devout Jews join with him. (The second time he stabbed twice as many, one of whom died.) ACTION: restored the image; expanded the caption to improve context: "prior to the city's Pride Parade" -- Deborahjay (talk) 11:44, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * This is all very plausible; unfortunately, without a published RS mentioning this type of rhetoric, it seems like WP:IMAGEOR. Any help finding appropriate references would be appreciated. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 14:28, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Estonian
Why does Estonian not have vowel harmony anf letters Õ, Ä, Ö and Ü in non-initial syllables? For example, why "he lives" is tema elab and not tämä eläb and "they leave" is nemad lähtevad and not nämäd lähteväd? I don't like that Finnish uses letter Ä more than Estonian, and also more than any other language I know. --40bus (talk) 18:25, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't know that the Finns needed to ask you what you liked when they designed their language... -- Jayron 32 18:31, 9 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Let me refer to my response to an earlier "why" question about natural languages that you posted a few days ago: such questions are generally unanswerable . This one is no exception to the rule. --Lambiam 19:23, 9 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I don't like that Spanish has two different verbs for "to be", but I don't see them changing that anytime soon. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:48, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You may like Turkish, which has no verb for to be. --Lambiam 20:16, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Those two Spanish verbs don't have exactly the same meaning.  It's like the Latin verb facere (from which comes Port. fazer) has two meanings, "to make" and "to do".   The verbs in question are ser and estar (from L. stare, "to stand".   As the origin suggests, the second implies a degree of transience lacking in the first.   These same verbs ser and estar have similar meanings in Portuguese.   To illustrate:Man sitting waiting for a train at Liverpool Street Station: Portuguese Está no banco ("he is on the bench").   There is a statue of a man doing the same thing by the entrance to the underground (subway).   Here you would use ser (É no banco), because he's not going to be getting up anytime soon. 80.44.95.49 (talk) 17:31, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Yep. Those two verbs have to do with "status" vs. "essence". Figuring out which one to use can be tricky to the non-native speaker. Meanwhile, I also don't like the fact that English words like "read" and "lead" can be pronounced to rhyme with "reed" or "red" depending on the usage. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:22, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead. Mathglot (talk) 00:25, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't like that new-fangled English singular you... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:21, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Nd dn't lk vwls, prd! --Lmbm 17:59, 10 Dcmbr 2022 (TC) 17:59, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Copula and Romance copula explain. --Error (talk) 23:18, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Assimilation (phonology) says that it becomes more common in rapid speech, so I theorized that maybe Finns speak more quickly than Estonians. But it seems in fact Estonians speak more quickly than Finns! Card Zero  (talk) 22:31, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Is it a German influence? --40bus (talk) 06:42, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * That's probably untestable and unprovable. It's probably best to simply accept the fact that unlike most Uralic languages, standard Estonian doesn't have vowel harmony (though some dialects, as well as the closely related Võro, do have it), without worrying about a "why". —Mahāgaja · talk 10:56, 12 December 2022 (UTC)