Why and Wherefore

This blog is an outgrowth of a research project I am conducting for the writing of a linguistics paper for the English Department of Herzog College. The subject of the research is languages in contact, with a focus on the interference caused by Hebrew in the English speech of bilinguals who have grown up in Israel, and whose primary language is Hebrew, although they are fluent in English as well. The posts will cite data, group instances according to type, and attempt to categorize the different types of language interference. Please comment; any additional examples of these or like phenomena, or suggested explanations, will be much appreciated!

Shared-translation Effect

One of the more interesting types of errors is what is referred to in the literature as the "shared-translation effect." This is when there is a word in L1 that has more than one translation into L2, and the speaker picks the "wrong" one when speaking L2. For example, the word כלי, keli, in Hebrew can mean either a tool, a container/vessel, or a utensil. A straightforward example of this I had is when my son Moshe (8.5 years old) saw a moving truck parked in front of an uninhabited house on our block, and asked: "Someone is passing there?" Besides for the misplacement of the word "is," also under the influence of Hebrew, the usage of the word "passing" is a result of the shared translation effect, as the word עובר, o'ver, in Hebrew can mean either to move homes or to pass someone or something.
A much more convoluted example is when Miryam (12.5 years old) opened the refrigerator and said: "The fridge is plain." It took a bit of detective work, but what happened here was that there wasn't much food in the fridge that morning (shopping day) and she meant to say that the fridge was empty. When offered a roll to eat, one can have it with something in it, e.g., peanut butter, or one can have it plain. In Hebrew, the way to say a plain roll would be לחמניה ריקה, lahmania reika. The word ריק, reik(a), also has the meaning of empty. Hence, an empty fridge is a "plain fridge."

Backwards and Upside-Down

Sometimes, the L2 speaker will use a wrong word or phrase, just because there is a gap in their lexical knowledge. For example, I was playing catch with Moshe, age 8, and he asked me to “throw the ball from the bottom.” He simply was not familiar with the term “throw it underhand,” so he used “from the bottom,” which is a word-for-word translation of מלמטה. There are other times, however, when they do know the correct word, but they say the wrong one, probably due to L1 interference. The very same Moshe, upon seeing that his little brother’s pajama shirt was on backwards, said: “Your shirt is upside-down.”  He has used the word “backwards” many times. What seems to have happened here is that the Hebrew word הפוך can be used either for backwards or upside-down, and he just crossed up which one to use.
Addendum: Believe it or not, just two days later, Chana (age 10) made the exact same mistake of using "upside-down" instead of "backwards" for my son's shirt (yes, when he dresses himself, he often puts his shirt on upside-down, I mean backwards).

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.