just a selkie in the sea

(I also go by Liz)

avatar by @PotechiPon on twitter


JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

my biblical Hebrew book sometimes rewrites folktales to use (mostly) the vocabulary we already know. but sometimes it goes a little off the rails in deciding when to introduce necessary vocab for the story and when to use vocabulary we already know.

for example, I am currently reading a Three Little Pigs where they gave us the words for "grass" and "wood". instead of teaching us "stone", though, the third pig builds his house out of gold.


JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

okay the third pig threw1 a gold dish at the animal trying to blow their gold house down, knocked them out2, and ate them. and then lived in the gold house forever.


  1. "sent to their head", but we can figure this out

  2. "the animal did not still stand"


JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

worth noting also that in the interest of not adding more story-specific vocab they elected to use the word "בְּהֵמָה" for the animal, a word that can mean "animal" but the vast majority of the time means "cattle". so I just imagined a marauding cow the entire time. which is also an upgrade on the original story imo.


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in reply to @JhoiraArtificer's post:

The First Hebrew Primer: The Adult Beginner's Path to Biblical Hebrew (3rd ed), by Simon, Resnikoff, and Motzkin. The vocab and grammar is selected so it's all words that show up 100+ times in the Bible so by the time you're done you can mostly get a lot of stuff, even if you still have to look up the details. On the whole I really like it!