B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

Oh, I understand what you mean.

When I was in ulpan ages ago, the teacher brought up the fact that people claim that Hebrew plural endings are "masculine" and "feminine," but that there is a list of "irregulars."

That list, she claimed, includes some 30% of the most common words in the language. כיסא is masculine and takes the "feminine" plural ending, as is אב and שולחן and מלון and חלון and so many others. The opposite is the case with עיר, which is feminine but takes the "masculine" plural ending.

If it's true that 30% of the most common nouns in the language take the "opposite" endings (as do the numbers), then it is probably a mistake on our part to label these endings "masculine" or "feminine." We cannot label such a common phenomenon "irregular." It is perfectly regular. We just need to fix our terminology.

It confused me when you said that עין takes a masculine plural, because it simply doesn't. It takes a dual ending, which is common to masculine and feminine nouns (dual isn't marked for gender). And even if it had taken "masculine" endings, we shouldn't think of it in those terms. It's just incorrect for the noun system.

I will agree that in the adjective and verb systems these endings agree with gender, but in nouns the statistics show something else.

kwrandolph wrote:That’s because a line of computer code is not a sentence. In fact, a single instruction can extend over several lines.

Even though I have never been a professional programmer, I have written thousands of lines of code. The lack of periods in coding doesn’t bother me. The lack of periods in written languages is wrong.

Karl W. Randolph.

That's true, but when the goal is screen printed output through concatenation of strings, it should end in a period.
This just seems wrong to me, since it outputs

> My name is Jason

I would always add a period, just to be clean.
The output annoys me when it doesn't have a period.

Jason: If I were a professor teaching computer coding, I would flag your first example as being in error, which you corrected in your second example. The reason for the error? You have an output that’s not computer code, rather human language. As such, the output should follow human language conventions.

My next message will be on Hebrew, that’s enough computer stuff for me.

Karl W. Randolph.

kwrandolph wrote:My next message will be on Hebrew, that’s enough computer stuff for me.

That's fine with me. We've about covered everything I know about computers.