Quote this

January 4, 2010 - 11:40 AM by Jessica · 3 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, design

Israelis like quotation marks. I’m in the midst of puzzling this one out, as it’s frustrated me for some time. Why, for instance, would the name of a school, as depicted at the front of the building, be spelled with quotation marks around its name? Or the names of two elephants gifted by Thailand to the Biblical Zoo? The end result is that any kind of text reads like a contract, with everyone referring to themselves in quotation marks.

I decided to research this a bit, after noting that an English translation of a press release I was using referred to the organization in, yes, quotation marks. Here’s what I found:

According to Wikipedia, acronyms in Hebrew are denoted with a punctuation bit called the geresh, which is often typed as an apostrophe. The geresh is singular to Hebrew because it started out life in the Torah, where it was used as punctuation and is now used primarily as a note of cantillation in the reading of the Torah and other biblical books. A double geresh (״), known by the plural form gershayim, is used to denote acronyms; it is inserted before (i.e., to the right of) the last letter of the acronym. As in Tzahal (צה”ל), the Hebrew acronym for the IDF, which is also an acronym for the Israel Defense Forces.

Anyway, until the early 1970s, most of the printed Hebrew texts put opening quotes low and closing quotes ones high, often going above the letters themselves. The word “ישראל„ would be a good example.

However, this distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has completely disappeared, and today, quotations are done as in English (ex. “ישראל”), with two high quotes. This is due to the advent of the Hebrew keyboard layout, which lacks the low opening quotation mark („).

Yet the use of quotation marks in what seems like odd places – to an English speaker like myself — appears to be rooted in the German language roots of Hebrew. When Hebrew was revived as a modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (whose seminal Hebrew-English dictionary is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary), the Russian revolutionary followed the norms of those who had come before him, basing modern Hebrew on biblical Hebrew, but with touches of Eastern Europe, where many of the first pioneers were born and raised. According to one blogger, Hebrew grammar and punctuation were based on Western standards, and the German punctuation system was adopted, until 1994, when the Academy of the Hebrew Language changed it to the English system. And in German, quotation marks are often used where English would use italics. Quotation marks are used in English for the titles of poems, articles, short stories, songs and TV shows. German expands this to the titles of books, novels, films, dramatic works and the names of newspapers or magazines, which would be italicized (or underlined in writing) in English:

So the names of two elephants, instead of being italicized, underlined or left alone, are instead placed inside quotation marks. To me, the American English speaker, it appears incorrect. To those educated in the local system, it’s just right.

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Tags: Academy of the Hebrew Language, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, geresh, IDF, Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, Tzahal

Going to the zoo

November 6, 2009 - 10:57 AM by Jessica · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General, Israeliness, Life, coexistence

I’ve been waiting for the right moment to introduce my baby boys to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, and given that their ears perk up every time they hear a dog bark, bird chirp or see a bird cross their path, I figured the time had come. Enough with reading about animals and faking a tiger’s snarl; we had to actually see some live animals.

The aggressive goat

The wait was well worth it — as is the annual membership which varies for singles, couples, couples with one child, two children, etc. — as they were equally enthusiastic about all the animals we saw, from ducks and flamingos to meerkats and yes, a couple of tigers. They both were slightly flipped out by the goats who swarmed their stroller in the ‘pinat chai’ (petting zoo), one trying to grab the remnant of Lev’s cookie out of his small fist. But once the goats butted out, it was on to bigger thrills, like stroking a sheep and watching turtles crawl around their enclosure.

The choices of animals to visit seems endless on that first trip to the zoo — elephants! zebras! monkeys! And what I also liked is the coexistence effect of the place; on a Thursday morning, the place was pleasantly full with ultra Orthodox boys on a school trip, Arab elementary school children in their red sweater uniforms, also on a school trip, as well as Arab high schoolers and similarly-aged Jewish high school kids. And just to prove the zoo’s coexistence effect, all signs next to the animals’ enclosures are written in Hebrew, Arabic, English and, often, Yiddish.

30seczoo01.MP3We’re [all] going to the zoo…

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