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").

Prepositions of Place

One area where there seems to be a particularly high incidence of interference in in the use of prepositions of place. For example, Miryam, age 11, said "Close the window till the end." This is obviously a translation of the Hebrew phrase: עד הסוף, while a "pure" native English (American) speaker would say "Close the window the whole way." Avraham, age 14, said "The field was after the store," instead of "behind the store." I think this is probably due to the Hebrew word מאחרי, which can be used to express both "after" and "behind," and him selecting the wrong translation in his English usage. He also described someone's house as being "against Beit Tefila," (the name of a local synagauge), as opposed to "opposite Beit Tefila." This is also a translation of מול, which in Hebrew is used for both "opposite," in the sense of location, and "against," in the sense, for example, of one team playing against another team.