Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Brzeczyszczykiewicz
Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-02, 7:17

So, I'm now studying pronominal suffixes and while the rules for adding them to nouns seem to me pretty straightforward (thus far, at least... :para: ), I'm unsure as to how you're supposed to stress such nouns once you've added those suffixes.

For instance, "ראשו" ('his head') would be pronounced "rósho" or "roshó"? "ראשינו" ('our heads') would be "rashéinu", right? But then what about "ראשיהם" ('their (m.) heads')? Would that be "rashéihem" or "rasheihém"?
"מלכתם" ('their (m.) queen') would be "malcátam" or "malcatám"?

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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Drink » 2020-05-03, 13:57

Basically each suffix has its own stress rule. If you're learning this from a textbook, then the textbook should mention where to stress each suffix, and if it doesn't it's a bad textbook. Anyway, hope this helps:

roshí (my)

rosh'chá (your m.sg.)

roshéch (your f.sg.)

roshó (his)

rosháh (her)

roshénu (our)

rosh'chém (your m.pl.)

rosh'chén (your f.pl.)

roshám (their m.)

roshán (their f.)

rasháy (my)

rashécha (your m.sg.)

rasháyich (your f.sg.)

rasháv (his)

rashéha (her)

rashénu (our)

rashechém (your m.pl.)

rashechén (your f.pl.)

rashehém (their m.)

rashehén (their f.)
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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-04, 2:43

Actually, no, I'm not learning it from any textbook, but I encounter these suffixes more and more often of late, which is to be expected, since I'm trying to read more in Hebrew, and I was going mad with frustration for not knowing the correct way to stress them.

Your answer definitely helps a lot, thank you very much!

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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Drink » 2020-05-04, 19:01

What sorts of things are you reading?
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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-04, 23:22

Mostly small things, such as short articles on a wide array of topics, fragments of novels, and I guess I should also include the numerous entries I look up daily on my Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary (can't help it, being the logophile I am) and where I find lots of instances of those pronominal suffixes.

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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Drink » 2020-05-04, 23:34

Ah got it. Which Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary do you have?
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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-05, 0:05

Actually, it's an old one, but it was quite a trouvaille, and it's amazingly good and complete! It's called "המילון העברי המרוכז" and it was published by "Kyriath Sepher", and edited by Avraham Even Shoshan.

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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Drink » 2020-05-05, 0:41

Ah! I have the newer version of that called מילון אבן שושן המרוכז.

In mine, the back of the book has grammar references that include all these pronoun tables and other things, with the stress marks. Not sure if your old version will have that.
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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-05, 1:10

Yeah, I believe it could be said that one's a bit like "Le Robert" for French speakers, eh? 8-)

Actually, mine does include all of those grammar references, as well as a couple other things, like a general overview of Semitic languages, Hebrew's history, names, numbers and measures charts, verb conjugation charts for all the binyanim, hell, there's even a chart with currency names for each country, but that one's only partially useful today, for obvious reasons. :mrgreen:
I also like the fact that it includes images for quite a few of the entries, something I always appreciate a lot in dictionaries.

So yes, the info on the pronominal suffixes is there, but either I haven't read it attentively enough :hmm: or it just doesn't include the stress marks.
Oh well, no biggie, so far it's the only serious complaint I can make of it, and I think that would hardly justify tossing it out. Not to mention that with this whole Covid-19 crap, I really can't afford spending a bucketful of bucks on a new one :wink: , not even for a bucketful of new terms mine's of course missing by now; for those newer words, I use the "Sapir Encyclopedic Dictionary" Android app. Do you know it? It's also an outstanding resource for Hebrew! :) Here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eitav.sapir

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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Drink » 2020-05-05, 2:54

Yeah I love this dictionary. It was a great purchase when I was in Israel a while back. The grammar reference was super helpful when I was starting out. And I remember I'd sometimes spend hours just flipping through and reading random entries. And I'd be looking up every other word in the definition in Morfix (which I highly recommend as a quick online Hebrew-English dictionary).

Anyway, now that I think about it, it's possible that those grammar references don't have stress marks even in my edition. I vaguely remember wondering about the stress on some of the verbs with object pronouns. And I'm too lazy to go check haha.

Never heard of that French dictionary you compared it to.

And as for the Sapir app, unfortunately I have an iPhone and cannot find that app in the App Store.
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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-06, 7:10

I can definitely relate to that! When I bought mine I kept opening it for weeks on random pages and taking a look at the entries that caught my attention the most, even though back then my vocabulary was very rudimentary and I couldn't understand much of it. :D

Like I said before, it really was quite a trouvaille, because that day I had gone to Gandhi, a very famous chain of bookshops here, with the intention of paying a visit to the languages section and see if we found something we liked, but we came out empty-handed.

However, on my way to the bus stop nearby to head back home, I noticed a man who had set up a small and rather improvised stall on the street, only a few meters away from the bookshop, and who was selling books, too.

That's not such a rare thing in that part of the city, but what caught my attention right away was the fact that among the stuff he was selling there were quite a few books in languages other than Spanish, including a couple of novels in Portuguese (hard to find that, over here!) and a large red tome with Hebrew characters on its cover... By that time, I had already started studying Modern Hebrew and while I already had my bilingual (and also very good) Prolog, I was desperately looking for a Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary, as well, since I've always liked having unilingual dictionaries for the languages I study as soon as I can afford it.

Well, as you can imagine, the moment I realized those were Hebrew letters on that huge book, I just made a beeline towards it. I didn't even bother to read its title, I simply opened it and started riffling through it, and it didn't take me long to find out what it actually was. I admit I expected it to be anything but a dictionary, let alone a Hebrew-Hebrew one, since I'd already had a couple of similar experiences, and in larger and settled second-hand bookshops, where I would spot, say, a large book in Russian or Mandarin, only to realize it was not a dictionary, and often it was also not something that really grabbed my interest enough to justify spending an equally large chunk of moolah on it. :wink:

I had to make a huge effort to hide the sudden enthusiasm that had flared inside me and calmly ask the man how much he wanted for it. I was expecting him to charge me a fortune, but perhaps because of some damage to the spine of it, or just because not many folks over here would be even remotely interested in such a treasure, in the first place, :( he was willing to let it go for a relatively small amount. Even today I can hardly believe my luck! All of a sudden, I no longer had to worry about getting the plurals and the construct state forms right, among many, many other things.

Cheers for the recommendation! I actually knew about Morfix already, but it's always nice to be reminded of good stuff. Though I must say I've always had the impression it's much more useful fir Hebrew speakers learning English than the the other way around. :mrgreen:

"Le petit Robert" and "Le Robert de poche" are quite well-known (and quite good, too) dictionaries among French learners over here, and I believe even in France itself they are far from unpopular or obscure. Maybe you folks in the States favor some other French dictionaries I'm not yet aware of?

I'm sorry about the app! I thought it was likely also available for iOS. I don't know about an iOS alternative for that one, but then again there's always hope; until only a couple of months ago I was still lamenting the fact that the Etymonline app was only available for iOS phones, and one good day, la voilà for Android, too! 8-)

(Edit: Damn, sorry for the novel...)

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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Drink » 2020-05-06, 20:59

Wow that's a great story!

I wouldn't know so much about French dictionaries. The only one I've ever owned was the small pocket English-French dictionary I bought when we were required to buy a dictionary when starting to study French in 7th grade. I really barely used it. For class, I just used the glossary in the textbook. And for leisure, I just used online dictionaries.

And looks like we have a lot in common, I LOVE Etymonline. Never knew they had an app though. Getting it right now :)
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Re: Stress on nouns with pronominal suffixes...

Postby Brzeczyszczykiewicz » 2020-05-07, 6:20

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

It's funny, but it's also true that often the greatest finds are those that happen when you weren't even looking for whatever it is you found. Ah, blessed serendipity, uh?

I had the same really-hard-to-believe-luck only a few months after getting that Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary, only this time it was a Catalan-Catalan one my eyes chanced upon. :mrgreen: That was in a second-hand bookshop right in the city's downtown, and while finding books in Catalan here is not quite as near-impossible as is the case with Hebrew, it was still a very rare thing, more so because it was also a dictionary, and a very good one, too, even if not quite as huge as our Hebrew one.

Unfortunately, this whole Covid-19 crap has of course forced the owners of those bookshops to close, at least temporarily, but given their already tough situation, with more and more people losing interest in printed books here, and more often than not, in books in whatever format they may be :| , it's hard to tell whether they'll be able to reopen... :(

Ah, I see! Yes, I admit I found it hard to believe you really had never heard of those "Robert"'s, but now I understand; I believe most of my classmates from French courses also relied almost exclusively on bilingual dictionaries, but unlike you I don't think they consulted French-French ones, not even online, not most of them, anyway. I first found out about "Le petit Robert" thanks to my fifth-level teacher (rather ironically, the only one whose teaching method I didn't much care for).
I asked her one day about the difference between using nombre and numéro, because I kept mixing them up the whole time, since in Spanish we just use número. :mrgreen:
And so she took her "Petit Robert" out of her handbag and read me the definitions for each term, and I guess she must have seen the glow of interest that lit my eyes as soon as she opened it, because she let me have a look-see at it, and told me where in the city I might find it. It's been almost ten years since that, and I've still got it with me, a bit battered, but faithful as ever. 8-)

Perhaps you're not interested in it, if you use online French dictionaries, but in case you are, I definitely recommend it! On the other hand, there's also an app for it, and that one is available for iOS, but it's not free. However, you can also access the site and just look up anything there, and over there it's actually free! Here's the link: https://www.lerobert.com/dictionnaires/francais/langue/dictionnaire-le-robert-mobile-application-ios-3133099064459.html

You also like Etymonline? That's really great! Go get the app right away, I assure you you'll love it!


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