Shlomi Fish wrote:
First of all, I should note that "April 21" is an Americanism which makes little sense and one should use "21 April" or "21st of April" in Commonwealth English or Israeli English.
Erez Schatz replied:
"April" and the entire Gregorian calendar are not-Hebrew and make little sense. One should use "Zain in I'yar".
To which Sawyer X replied:
Actually, if we're gonna nitpick… "Zain" and "I'yar" are hebrew words, but "in" is not. It's an Englishification of the sentence. You should write "Zain be'I'yar". :)
To which Shlomi Fish replied:
Romanisation is an imperialistic practice and we must not succumb to it. We should write the date as "ז' באייר" using the Hebrew alphabet exclusively. ;-)
To which Sawyer X replied:
You win best reply!
To which Shlomi Fish replied:
Yes, but I haven't finished yet. The contemporary names for the Hebrew months are Pagan, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyar is:
«(Hebrew: אִייָר or אִיָּר, Standard Iyyar Tiberian ʾIyyār ; from Akkadian ayyaru, meaning "Rosette; blossom"…The name is Babylonian in origin.»
(And Tamuz is the name of a Phoenician god who is akin to the Egyptian Ossiris.)
As a result, we should use the old Biblican numerical names of the months and call "Iyar" "The Eighth month" if we start from Tishrey or "The Second Month" if we start from Nissan and say that "Zayin in Iyar" is "Hayom hashvi3i bahodesh hasheni" or "Hayom hashvi3i bahodesh hashmini.". ;-) (I'm using the evil transliteration to Latin out of laziness but I'm consistently inconsistent.)
And we should also revert to the old Phoenician / Kna'anite alphabet which was originally used for writing Hebrew instead of the contemporary Hebrew alphabet that is derived from the Aramaic transformation of it… (There are actually characters for it in Unicode).
| Author | Shlomi Fish |
| Work | Perl-Israel April 2010 Archive |