Word Order

I would conjecture to say that the most common form of cross-lingual interference between Hebrew and English is in choice of word order. However, there are times that there is merely an inversion of the word order, while in other cases it is almost as if a Hebrew sentence is stated in English. For example, Miryam, 12 years old, said: "We got for our teacher something." In this case, the statement "We got something for our teacher," is perfect English, and the "something" was moved to the end of the sentence. This is a syntactic, but not semantic, error. Contrast this with the utterance of Moshe (8 years old): "He came before a year." In English, one would say "He came a year ago." In this case, not only is the word "year" moved from its proper location, but he chose words that are a direct translation of the Hebrew (הוא בא לפני שנה). Here, the error is both syntactic (wrong placement of "year") and semantic (shouldn't have used "before," but "ago").