Re: OT: Jewish Law Part II

Charlie <no.spam.ever@xxxxxx> wrote:

"Des" <des@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5pu805-gf.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Champ <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 7 Nov 2007 12:17:38 -0000, "Charlie" <no.spam.ever@xxxxxx>
wrote:

BABLAT

? Qué ?

Hebrew: baloney, but is an acronym of "beelbool beytseem le-lo
takhleet" which means "bothering someone's testicles for no
reason".

LOL..

I'm ashamed to say that I read it here while search for something
else..

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weirdworld/2007/10/23/weird-and-wondrful-foreign-phrases-89520-19993239/

.. so it's possibly complete tosh.

I just checked with my Yemenite colleague who has spoken Hebrew all her
life. It's tosh.

Well, I found this:

http://jewschool.com/2005/02/23/the-word-on-the-street/

which could well have been the original 'seeding' of the word. Of
course,
once anything's appeared online it becomes authoritative ...

On the other hand - I've spoken English all my life, but I wouldn't
presume to say that a phrase I'd not heard had therefore never been
used.

You miss the point (no ***..). As a native speaker, you not only have a
sort of 'list' in your head of all the words and expressions that you
know,
but you also have a sort of 'fuzzy logic database' that allows you to make
a very, _very_ good guess as to whether a word or expression that you
might
never have heard, is valid in your language.

I've spoken English all my life, have an active and inquisitive interest in
words and a passably wide vocabulary. Nevertheless, I don't know [quite] all
the ~600,000 words in the OED.

Nor do I, but as an aside, there are far fewer words in Hebrew.

I would, therefore, not presume to dismiss
as tosh an assertion that a word or expression, which I hadn't come across,
was current or valid. You claimed that, because someone who speaks Yemenite
Hebrew hadn't heard of a piece of obscure slang, the expression was
necessarily tosh. It may well yet turn out to be, but my mind remains open.

I've often been asked what _x_ word or expression means and if I don't know
it, I'll say 'it's non-existent in English'. I've (so far) never been
proved wrong. Not because I'm some sort of 'god of English', for as I've
made clear, my years in France have contributed to weaken my English to the
point where I probably speak it less well than most educated members of
this newsgroup (although as a natural 'nit-picker', my grammar and
punctuation are still pretty good), but because I have the native speaker
'fuzzy logic' that enables me to say that such and such a word isn't in my
language.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to do this in French as well like, for
example, when someone says or writes a word that I don't know. I can guess
whether it is in fact a real word (I've got probably a 90% success rate)
and if it is, can guess with something approaching 100% the gender.

As for 'I would, therefore, not presume to dismiss..' etc., all I can say
is that you should try it.

So if I say, 'wakka noo-peck, eekum spaker-nah 'em bak', I'm willing to
bet
that you've never heard that. I'm also willing to bet that you can tell
right away that it's not a valid English expression. How? After all, you
'wouldn't presume to say that a phrase [you'd] not heard had therefore
never been used'. So how do you know that it's nonsense?

Simple: you know that it's nonsense because you _know_ the sounds of your
native language.

It could very easily, in the phrase you cite, be a bit of Pennine dialect,
along the lines of "yann chan tether mether pip" [which is itself spelt in
countless different ways], for example. Geordie, Scouse and Cornish all
have words and expressions which defy interpretive logic for me, but that
doesn't disqualify them from being English.

In which case, we're getting away from the 'core language', and probably
into a discussion about what constitutes 'dialect'. In any case, you'll
appreciate that the question of dialects is different in English and in
Hebrew (which was the language that started this Des Bas^H^H^Hsubthread.

The person who responded is a native Hebrew speaker, and thus she heard a
word and knew right away that it meant nothing in that language.

But even the citation from 'Tingo Toujours' makes the point that 'bablat' is
a contrived acronym, not a word with any provenance or derivation. It
merely has the 'flavour' of Hebrew, but doesn't have to conform to any
linguistic rules.

Which would render my colleague's point, correct.

It may very well turn out to be a spoof word, planted in
a Jewish website, which has become validated by web-repetition. Give it a
chance to prove itself, before mouthing off that it must be, by definition,
'tosh'.

Point of order: I did no more than cite someone whose command of modern
Hebrew is far superior to mine.

D.
--
des | parce que je le vaux bien...
French Biking Vocabulary: http://minilien.fr/a0kg0p
.