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A friend who's a native Hebrew speaker told me that modern Hebrew initially lacked foul words, and so they were borrowed from Arabic.
by andrewem 15y ago
A friend who's a native Hebrew speaker told me that modern Hebrew initially lacked foul words, and so they were borrowed from Arabic.
- philwelch 15y agoThat makes sense, as modern Hebrew is largely reconstructed ancient Hebrew with added words for things that were invented in the past several centuries. I don't think the people who reconstructed Hebrew would have gone out of their way to include foul words. What is surprising is that the foul words were borrowed from Arabic, and not Yiddish or any of the other languages commonly spoken by the Jews who settled in Israel.
- beagle3 15y agoIsraelis curse in a mix of Arabic, Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish and recently even English -- but at least at this point in time, Arabic is the dominant source. There's a decent selection of biblical foul words to use, by the way, and many are in use. And the reference to a penis is interesting in its own way - at least three times in the last 200 years, a new "safe" reference, and the reference took over as the improper foul word. The one in the last 50 years is literally equivalent to "the f" (as in, "the f word") was spawned verbs equivalent to "I will f you" -- the emerging noun, "זיון", is pronounced exactly the same as the f*cking Microsoft iPod competitor.