On comparative linguistics.

If you needed any more proof that there’s a predictive text function hardwired into our brains it’s come from trying to sing The Chichester Psalms, which happens to be in Hebrew. This is a language you have no idea about and it turns out to be astonishingly difficult to even attempt to put the words in when you don’t have any idea of what sounds might be reasonably expected to be coming up next.

Admittedly you’ll make horrendous fluffs with the English sounds sometimes. Turning the page and realising that the next sound shows that instead of ‘caaaaaaaaaaaaaalming’ you were supposed to be singing ‘caaaaaaaaaaaaaatering’ or ‘caaaaaaaaaaaaaandle’ or ‘caaaaaaaaaaaaalling’ is not a very unusual occurance. Despite the fact that you should really have worked that out for yourself. “I’m going on Holiday so I mustn’t forget to put our feline pet in the caaaaaaaaaaaaattery” makes so much more sense than anything else, you’d think. That line sounds much better in proper plainsong, by the way.

This kind of mangling, however, has much more to do with your sublime disregard for the lyrics of songs than anything else. Your version always makes some kind of sense.

Anyway, we are now over the note-crunching stage and you are tentatively stepping away from the universal ‘laaaing’ you’ve been steadfastly clinging to for the last month or so and having a go at the words. And in the course of this process you’ve learnt a few things about Hebrew. One is that ‘Adonai’ means ‘Lord’. As in ‘The Lord God’, you understand, not something feudal. Which is about the only word you’ve been able to figure out, but then you are notoriously bad at this.

And the other is that it seems to be a considerably more concise sort of language than English. Particularly when English slips into Latinate mode, which it has a tendency to do for things like psalms. For example ”Adonai ro-i, lo ehsar,” is as much as you need to get across “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Is there no grammar in Hebrew to be held together by auxiliary verbs, pronouns, negative prefixes and suffixes, or possessives? And if not, can I switch?

The thing to remember about this is that no matter how short the syllables and no matter how many apostrophes are in there in place of ‘neutral vowel sounds’ - I do hope it sounds like the English ’schwa’ or we are all making some kind of hideous mistake - it is not, repeat not Klingon.

Knowing the phonemic script has come in terribly handy though. You feel quite smug that as everybody else scribles longwinded notes in the margins regarding pronunciation you are able to elegantly transcribe it all using a few useful symbols. And where the English set of phonemes runs out - ‘ch’ is apparently pronounced ‘as in German’. Since you don’t speak German, you’ve been assuming Scottish will be ok - you’ve got the Cyrillic alphabet to fall back on.

So the last ten years haven’t been entirely wasted then.