The Dumpster
The following photo is a sign pasted on the side of a waste dumpster at a construction site in Brooklyn. It was taken with my LG camera cell phone.
This image looks a bit blurry. I used the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to sharpen and rescale it:
OK, much better.
The objective is to determine what this sign is saying.
For a beginning student of the Hebrew alphabet, one of the difficulties in reading random Hebrew street signs or phrases is the fact that the vowels are omitted. Indeed, in this particular example, only consonants are shown (in block letter format) and the vowels are implicitly understood.
This vowel omission convention happens because it is a shorthand for reasons of convenience (the Jews happen to be lazy just like the rest of us).
It happens in Old Testament Systematic Theology also. One of the many names of God, Yahweh, happens to be represented as follows: YHWH. There are no vowels there. It is implicitly understood.
I shall reproduce the phrase here:
תבש רמוש
Note: I re-wrote the phrase in mirror-inverse of the original because Hebrew sentences are read right to left, unlike English where it is read left to right. Some purists may think doing something like that is sacrilege. Don’t worry. I’ll remember to put the phrase back in the correct order after I’m done. You have to do this kind of mental gear shift when reading Hebrew, the feeling is rather akin to driving a car in England or Ireland, where the steering wheel is on the right and you drive on the left side of the road.
Each letter has a name:
ש - shin or sin, depending on the position of the digesh*.
ו - vav
מ - mem
ר - resh
ב - bet
ת - tav
* basically a small dot that appears somewhere around or in and close to that letter. It is also omitted for implicit understanding shorthand.
The cool thing about Hebrew is that you can map each letter to a corresponding letter, or a dual letter combination, in the English alphabet.
Shin maps to “sh”
Sin maps to “s”
Vav maps to “v”
Mem maps to “m”
Bet maps to “b” or “v”, depending upon the presence of a digesh in that letter.
Tav maps to “t”
It’s not always a one-to-one mapping. There are some letters that are different but represents the same “saying-sound”. For example, the sin and the samech (ס), have the same saying-sound. It is sort of reminescent of homonyms, words that are spelled differently but have the same pronunciation. I shall call these letters homo-letters.
The first order of business is to identify which letters are certain and which have a degree of uncertainty as to what it really is. The mem, resh, and the tav are certain and definite. The ones that are in doubt are the:
sin/shin
vav
bet.
sin/shin can be either sin or shin, depending upon the position of the digesh. Since the digesh is not shown, it is uncertain. If the digesh is on the right hand side, then it is a shin. Otherwise, it is a sin. Helpful mneumonic: it is no ’sin’ to be a lefty, ’she’ is always right.
The bet can either be a “v” or a “b”, with corresponding saying-sounds, depending upon the presence or absence of a digesh inside the letter. If there is a digesh, then it is a “b”. Otherwise, it is a “v”. Helpful mneumonic: if it contains the digesh, it looks like a catcher’s mitt holding a ball, otherwise it looks vacant.
Lastly, the vav. Now this letter is a bit more complicated. Not only can it be just a regular consonant, but in certain cases, it plays a role of a “vowel-helper” within a word. If it is a vowel-helper, then it can be one of three different, nested possibilities as a vowel-helper (v-h):
v-h for a preceding vowel.
v-h in and of itself.
If the second case is true , then it can be one of two further possibilities:
digesh on top, wherein it would have an “o” saying-sound.
digesh in middle, wherein it would have an “ooh” saying-sound.
Given all these different possibilities, there are
(2 * 3 * 1 * 1) * (2 * 2 * 1) =
24 different possibilities of what that phrase could be. If one factors in vowels and the schva, there are a lot more possibilties. But to keep things simple, we shall conveniently disregard the vowels and the schva.
Now, this is the juncture where the logical, letter-crunching part of the decoding ends and where “social engineering” begins. In order to correctly “fill in the gaps”, one must rely upon an intuitive feel for which possibility is likely to be the correct one, based upon a general knowledge base of Hebrew words. When that is not sufficient, then one must interact with a person familiar with Hebrew (preferably one with long hair and nice hips) to fill in the remaining gaps.
You start with the easy part first. Now the word
תבש
approximates as
S V T
S B T
SH V T
SH B T
you pronounce each possibility out loud, mentally filling in the missing vowels as you do so. Some will intuitively sound “more right” than others. Each approximation points in a general direction of the true word and its pronunciation (like probability amplitude vectors which are integrated over time to reveal a superposition vector for an event in quantum electrodynamics*). Each vaguely sounds like the well-known word shabbat, which is Sabbath in English.
Therefore, for that word:
The “sin/shin” uncertainty collapses to a “sh” and the “v/b” uncertainty collapses to a “b”.
The other word is more tougher, because of the presence of the complicated vav, which can also be a vowel-helper. Consider each possibility, pronouncing each one out loud and feel them out for which one feels more “right”:
SH V M R
S V M R
SH o M R
SH ooh M R
S o M R
S ooh M R
The word feels better with the “sin/shin” as a “shin”, and since the other word revealed itself to contain a “shin”, it is likely that it is a “shin” for this one as well. As for the “vav”, turns out it actually feels awkward and clumsy as a “v”. So it is likely a vowel-helper. But which one? The possibilities can be as diverse as
SH a M R to SH ooh M R
This is where you need to do some “social engineering” with someone with a Hebrew background, preferably one with long hair and nice tits, I mean, hips.
The phrase is pronounced as:
Shomar Shabbat.
Turns out that this particular construction site waste dumpster is an observer of the Jewish Sabbath.
Now, Hebrew is phonetic. That means it is possible to read a text of Hebrew beautifully and have absolutely no idea what it all means. In this sense, Hebrew is the same as hangeul, the only East Asian written language that is completely an alphabet, rather than a conglomeration of thousands upon thousands of pictogram characters. In order to fill in this gap, one must do some “social engineering” with someone with a Hebrew background, preferably one with long hair and nice…you get the idea.
* The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard P Feynman
February 2, 2008 at 3:12 am
pos yourgirls