By Yekutiel Bornstein
Last Updated 5/16/2016 at 4:30 PM
Jerusalem, Givat Ram: Government and Academic sources, speaking at a Conference held at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, made an astonishing admission today: that the use of Vowels in Hebrew is just one giant punk on Olim.
“Honestly, we never thought it would go on this long.” chuckled Professor Binyamin M. “After the Six Day War, a lot of Western Olim started showing up to volunteer, and some of the Kibbutzniks thought it would be funny to tell them that there were special invisible dots and lines underneath the letters that they can’t see but that they must say. And they went along with it! I guess the Emperor really wears no clothes.”
President Rivlin, who was on site to present an award for the best new Hebrew playwright, couldn’t contain his laughter. “It’s all a joke! Kamatz, Patach, Segol. We even wondered if we could force Olim to draw a Tic-Tac-Toe Board, so we made up the Shuruk! Good times!”
The Academy explained that when an Oleh does something particularly Israeli, they hold a secret ceremony and read them into the joke. Jessica, a Canadian Olah Hadashah who recently screamed at a man on an electric bicycle for 5 minutes without letting go of the 11 dogs she was walking, while eating a sandwich and keeping up with 2 Whats-App Group conversations before finally ending the argument and discreetly giving the man her phone number, explained. “So yeah, after my little “incident”, the head of Misrad HaKlita brought me to Hebrew University for the ceremony.” When the Daily Freier asked Jessica if she could describe the ceremony, she insisted that she had been sworn to secrecy. When the Daily Freier asked her if the ceremony involved hummus, she changed the subject.
lol
I highly doubt that what is being reported here is accurate, because if so, then the president of Israel was just exposed as EXTREMELY and UTTERLY ignorant about the basics of the Hebrew language, claiming that they MADE UP the vowels some 50 years ago on an attempt at humor, when there are manuscripts dating back to the Middle Ages which have the VERY SAME VOWELS and which prove that these very vowels (“Shuruk” included) were used to pronounce the verses of the Torah since 750 AD!!!!! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_HebreW)
It is called Tiberian Hebrew (or ניקוד טבריני)
I would call it gall and audacity to speak such utter nonsense if it wasn’t so pathetically childish and boorish to say something so easily refutable by scholars, archaeologists, etc.
This is even funnier than the article itself.
Swoosh!
Geez, Schmuel, have a humor!
What one CAN say is that the makers of the modern Hebrew which was to be spoken in the new state of Israel did not intend to introduce vowels to their language, as they wanted their language to be read easily without the vowels. But to go so far as to say that they INVENTED the vowels and their shapes, that is absolutely laughable and it is embarrassing for someone of such stature to say such a thing. (And you don’t need to go so far as 750 AD; as I have plenty of prayer books and Chumashim (Torah books) in my house dating from the 1800s, with the vowels and their names written in them.
What one CAN also say is that satire poses a real difficulty for some people.
Looks like some people don’t read the fine print under “The Daily Freier” at the top of the page.
Shhhhh!
Thank you everyone for bringing me to that important realization…;)
I would advise the editorial staff here however, that good satire is infinitely more funny and entertaining, when it contains some level of truth and plausibility to it…
Hugs
Shmuel is officially thread-king here.