I'm learning Hebrew at the moment. And one thing that people say to me quite a bit is that I should appreciate Hebew, because it is a very mathematical language. And to be honest, I've never really understood that, until today.
I used to be quite good at maths, well - until my second year at Cambridge. Maths was great, because all I needed was to understand a few simple facts, and then everything else was obvious. But Hebrew didn't seem to be like that at all....
As far as I can tell, Hebrew has a very large number of odd and silly rules, but if you follow those rules, it tends to work.
Today I finally made the conceptual leap. Hebrew is like maths, as encountered by people who aren't very good at it.
1 comment:
Now, if someone had told me at school that maths was like Hebrew, I'm sure I would have taken a great deal more interest! But hey, I'm a linguist, even if I don't speak Hebrew (yet...) :-) I like your blog.
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