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.
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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