Lesson 4 :Hebrew pronouns

The agenda of the previous three lessons was to introduce you to the Hebrew language. You only repeated phrases from the list. Now to actually start using those phrases we need pronouns, so we can build phrases like “you need” or “we want”.

It might sound a bit trivial for some of you who already know this material and consider it trivial. Nevertheless, some more practice never hurts.

Numbers in Hebrew. Part 3. Hundreds, thousands, and more.

Some of you had probably heard the name "Me'a She`arim". Know the meaning? Bingo, "Hundred Gates". מֵאָה [ me'a ] means hundred. (In spoken Hebrew it's also pronounced as [ me'a ], with the stress on the first syllable.)

Numbers in Hebrew. Part 2. Numbers from 11 to 19 and beyond

Now, after we've learned some basics about numericals, let's take a look on an advanced part.
First of all, we've only covered numericals from 1 to 10. What about the numbers beyond that?

The -teen numbers in Hebrew are formed as a combination ("smikhut") of a number and a word "asar"/עָשָׂר (or "esre"/עֶשְׂרֶה.)

Remember, the "One, who knows" song? Shneim-asar shivtaya (שנים-עשר שבטיא) - the Twelf Tribes. You may ask, why it's "esre"(f)/"asar"(m) rather than familiar "eser"(f)/"asara"(m), or my G-d, it's conusing! And the answer would be: for the same reason "-teen" is not "exactly" "ten", buddy. So, here come the numbers from 11 to 19: ahat-esre, shteim-esre, shva`-esre, etc. (Try to memorize them in the feminine form, which is used for counting.)

לְאַלְתָּר, לְאַלְתֵּר, אִלְתֵּר

There is a word לְאַלְתָּר in modern Hebrew, meaning "immediately". There is also another word that means the same: מיד, and all its relatives: מיידית, תכף ומיד. Anyway, the word לאלתר and the verb אִלְתֵּר/לְאַלְתֵּר (to improvise) sound to close to English word "to alter" (which originates from Latin), so it sounded suspicious to me, and I made some little research on the topic. It sounded like the Hebrew word comes from the meaning "to adjust, to change", with a slight semantic shift towards "to make immediate change."

By popular demand I'm starting a short series of articles about Hebrew numbers.

For those of you who craves for other types of articles: I'm not going to use it as excuse to delay all the rest.

But numerals is an essential part of any language, anyway, so it definitely worth reading!