Re: TRANS: Fw: names of ants

On 1 May, Steg wrote:

>On Mon, 1 May 2000 17:21:01 +0300 Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...>
>writes:
>> And if we're including natlangs too, in Hebrew it would be:
>>
>> af exad zoxer shemot shel nemalim .
>>
>> (Although, on the street, most people would probably
>> use a grammatically incorrect double-negative by adding "lo" (=no):
>> af exad lo zoxer shemot shel nemalim. )
>>
>> Dan Sulani
>-
>
>That's grammatically incorrect?
>I had a very knowledgable Hebrew teacher in highschool make us insert the
>_lo'_.  She said that "there is nothing intrinsically negative in _af
>ehhad_, so you need _lo'_ to make it negative".
That's more or less what my daughter told me when I asked her
(unfortunately after I had sent my post.). I wrote what I did based upon
what I was told by a college-educated native Hebrew speaker at work.
FWIW, dropping the "lo" _does_ sound strange to my ears.

>What effect would changing _shemot_ to _shemotam_ have?
This time I asked two _other_  native speakers at work
(one of them, our secretary) and got the following answer:

af exad lo zoxer et shemotehen shel nemalim.

"their names" would be "shemotehem" ("shemotam" ,they said, sounds
too Biblical). But anyhow, the "-m" at the end signifies masculine gender.
Since "ant" in Hebrew is feminine, one must use the feminine:  "-n".
Saying that no one remembers "their-names" (shemotehen) instead of
simply "names" (shemot) seems to require the use of "et", the direct
object marker. With "shemot", the use (or not) of the direct object marker
seems to be a matter of emphasis.


Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.