I heard a presenter on Israel radio this week bemoaning the prevalence of car-owners using their phones while driving. He claimed, although he was clearly joking, that he personally always kept both hands on the wheel in what I would call the ‘ten-to-two’ position. Only he called it ‘עשר ועשרה’ (which transliterates as ‘esser v’assarah’ and translates as ‘ten past ten’), and which, unwittingly, set me on the path to all I need for a complete blog post this week. I apologise to those of you who have no Hebrew, because there will be bits here that won’t be easy to follow, but I have tried to imagine myself reading a similar blog post that someone else had written comparing language usage in Swahili and English, and I have managed to convince myself, if I stand back a bit, and squint, that I would find it fascinating. So, here goes…and if you’re leaving already, I’ll hope to see you next week: same time, same place.
The presenter actually set me on two paths. One is fairly well-trodden, easy to follow and hardly meanders at all, so we’ll take that one first. I found myself, first, filing the phrase ‘esser v’assarah’ away as one of those examples of a non-literal translation. Hebrew-speakers look at the position of the hands, and read the ‘time’ as ten past ten; English-speakers read it as ten to two. Neither, of course, is more inherently correct than the other, since, in most cases, the driver’s two arms are of equal length, so there is no determinable minute hand or hour hand here.
One other pair of phrases in the same file concerns how Hebrew and English describe perfect vision. In English, we speak of ‘twenty-twenty vision’, while Hebrew refers to ‘seeing six-six’ ((‘רואים שש-שש’. The reason for the difference here is rather more obvious: 6 (metric) metres being close to 20 (imperial) feet. (Just for the record, the difference is 3.78 inches (or, if you prefer, 9.6 centimetres, a difference small enough to inappropriately turn a blind eye to.)
It strikes me that there are two plausible reasons for English opting for ‘ten to two’. First, the alliteration (the triple initial ‘t’ sound) is euphonious. Second, ‘ten past ten’, correctly enunciated, requires a slight pause between the final ‘t’ of ‘past’ and the initial ‘t’ of ‘ten’ that is not easy to achieve cleanly without slowing down; whereas ‘ten to two’ trips off the tongue.
While I don’t really feel qualified to comment similarly on plausible reasons for the Hebrew choice, it does seem to me that there is something pleasing in using both the masculine and feminine forms of the word for ‘ten’ (‘assarah’ and ‘esser’) consecutively.
No sooner had I thought of this explanation than I consciously registered something that I have never, as far as I am aware, noticed before. When telling the time in Hebrew, the number representing the minutes in expressed in the masculine, while the number representing the hour is expressed in the feminine. I did what I usually do in these situations. First, I questioned both my go-to literate native-Hebrew-speaker friend (thank you, Hagit), and the handier one of my two literate native-Hebrew-speaker daughters-in-law (four hyphens in six words – an ‘Is-this-a-record?’ moment). I got from both of them the answer that I more or less expected, given that this use of numbers (in telling the time) is such a fundamental piece of language usage. They both basically said: “Wow! That’s interesting! I’ve never really noticed. I don’t know why.”
In earlier times, Hagit would then have asked her Hebrew-language teacher mother, but she sadly died a few years ago. Maayan asked her pet AI, Claude, who gave an answer that was as smug and, simultaneously, as unsatisfyingly incomplete as one would expect from something with an effete French name.
Left to my own devices, I did what I always do in these situations, and explored the excellent website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which brings erudition and sensitivity, but not a trace of one-upmanship, to the question of ruling on recommended Hebrew usage. I realise with a shock that I have been asking questions of the academy for 36 years, since I was employed as the founding Director of the British Council’s English Language School. When I drafted our first posters in Hebrew advertising classes, I had no idea whether to write the lesson times (for example 19:00–20:30) left-to-right (as one does in English) or right-to-left (for example 20:30–19:00). At the time, the Academy informed me that both conventions were acceptable, which seemed a little bizarre to me. In the end, I opted for right-to-left, so as not to interrupt the natural reading direction.
On the question of number gender for telling the time, the Academy has a lot to say about the peculiarities of number-gender in Hebrew in general, but nothing specifically about telling the time. It is an odd feature of Hebrew (and, apparently, all Semitic languages, so it is an odd feature that began in antiquity) that the normal method of forming the feminine in Hebrew is stood on its head when it comes to numbers. The usual root form for an adjective is the masculine: ‘tov’, for example, means ‘good’. The feminine is then typically formed by adding a ‘ה’ to the end of the word, pronounced ‘ah’. A similar form is used if nouns have a masculine and feminine form. So, a good male friend is ‘haver tov’, whereas a good female friend is ‘haverah tovah’.
Numbers behave rather differently. The masculine and feminine forms of numbers 1 and 2 are irregular. Those forms of 3–10 are the reverse of the normal rule: the feminine is the simple root form, and the masculine is formed by adding a ‘ה’. The numbers 11–19 are formed as compounds: ‘one-ten’, ‘two-ten’…’nine-ten’, with the ‘ten’ having different compound forms for masculine and feminine. From 20 upwards, the masculine and feminine forms are identical.
So, 4 is ‘arba’ah’ (masculine) or ‘arba’ (feminine) and 14 is ‘arba’ah assar’ (M) or ‘arba essrai’ (F).
This allows a number used as an adjective to agree in gender with the noun it describes. So, ‘hamishah banim’ (5 boys) but ‘hamesh banot’ (5 girls). Since the number that looks and sounds feminine is in fact masculine, and vice versa, learners of Hebrew have great difficulty using numbers correctly.
Turning our attention to telling the time, when we say ’10 past 10’, we mean, of course, ‘ten minutes past ten o’clock’. Clearly, the first 10 is an adjective describing the ‘understood’ ‘minutes’. Since minutes is ‘dakot’ in Hebrew, a feminine noun, logic demands that we should say ‘esser l’esser’ and not ‘assarah l’esser’.
Incidentally, the second ‘10’ is not an adjective describing ‘hours’, but a ‘standalone’ number, like the number of a bus route or a road. In Hebrew, these numbers are, by convention, always feminine (for numbers 3–10, the simpler form of the number). So, even though ‘kvish’ (road) and ‘kav’ (bus route) are both masculine, Hebrew speaks of ‘kav shalosh’ and ‘kvish shesh’.
Going back to that first 10 – the one that ‘ought’ to be feminine but is masculine – I could not think of any reason to explain this usage, and I could not find an answer on the Academy’s website. So, I used their ridiculously straightforward messaging system on the site, and asked the question. Within ten minutes, I received an email. I assumed that it was an automatic acknowledgement of receipt. However, when I opened it, I found it contained a link to an article on their website that fully explained the peculiar usage.
Let me just say that again: in response to an online query, an Israeli quasi-governmental national institution responded within 10 minutes with a precise and exhaustive reply to my query.
For the benefit of those of you (or should that be the one of you) who want (or, perhaps, wants) to admire the thoroughness and erudition of the response, I am including a link here.
For the other one or perhaps two of you who are still reading, here is a summary of the Academy’s response.
This usage is probably a relic of the past when the unit of time ‘daka’ was called by another name, and more precisely by other names. The more familiar name is ‘rega’ (M). In the language of the Biblical sources, a rega is a very short time. It was then used generally to mean any period of time smaller than an hour. In later generations, it began to be used to mean ‘one sixtieth of an hour’. The word rega in the sense of ‘minute’ was accepted until recent generations, and is still heard here and there, especially in phrases such as ‘Wait a minute!’
Another word that was used to denote one sixtieth of an hour is dak (M). This word found its way into Hebrew poetry:
In modern times, the feminine form daka began to be used alongside the word dak. In the end, daka prevailed. However, the regaַ and dak that were used here in the past left their mark in the common patterns ‘esser v’assara’, ‘hamisha l’chamesh’ and so on. A similar phenomenon also occurs in the field of money (when talking about a unit that is 0ne-hundredth of a shekel: the grush (in the masculine) was indeed replaced by the agora (in the feminine), but it retained its masculinity in formulations such as ‘shekel v’assarah’.
These linguistic practices are deeply rooted in speech, and it is doubtful whether there is any point in seeing them as a real disruption and fighting them. However, those who are careful with their language would prefer ‘esser dakot l’esser’, ‘hamesh v’shalosh dakot’, and so on.
So there you have it. The Academy provides a scholarly analysis. The original even quotes the Talmud’s use of ‘rega’ and also two early-modern Hebrew poems that use ‘dak’. However, as a bottom line, it recognises that a spoken language belongs to its speakers, and that attempting to rectify this ‘mistake’ would be a divisive and lost cause, and so, it concludes that, realistically, ‘esser v’assarah’ is here to stay.
And today’s most important takeaway is, in the words of the immortal Avons’ British hit of 1959:
Keep your mind on your driving
Keep your hands on the wheel
And keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead.
And, with a scarcely detectable segue, I wish those of you celebrating later this week: Hag Shavuot Sameah.
