[poll] Names!

[pne]

To clarify slightly (hopefully): the "more than two middle names" was meant to read "more than two given names (i.e., more than one middle name)". And the "human" option is for those who would prefer to answer neither "male" nor "female"; I take it for granted that most people who chose "male" or "female" also consider themselves "human".

[Poll #482803] [Poll #482804]

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Could well be. I just didn't hear it used enough and wasn't certain, and figured it better to leave it out than get it wrong.

I do know some say Bat and some say Bas, and I'm not really clear on why. There are a lot of differences like that in Hebrew that I understand. For example, my Hebrew first name is either Deborah or Devorah. It's pretty much equally both, because the letter is bet/vet. Bet and Vet are either two different letters or one letter, depending on how you look at it. The only difference is a vowel marker (not really a vowel in this case, but the markers you put in when you're writing Hebrew with vowels). Since Hebrew is generally written without them bet and vet are interchangeable. So you can get b/v ... confusion... if confusion is the right word. They're just both right. You can get the same thing with pey/fey for a p/f sound. And shin/sin for sh/s sounds.

But I can't think of a t/s issue like that. So, it's kind of weird. But I really don't know a lot of Hebrew or the related culture of how it is used.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I do know some say Bat and some say Bas, and I'm not really clear on why.

I think this has to do with Jews in different parts of the world having evolved different pronunciations, sort of like British and American pronunciations (some say "cot" and "caught" the same, some distinguish between them, sort of thing). IIRC there're two main groups of pronunciation: Ashkenazic (originally from north-eastern Europe?) and Sephardic (originally from Spain?).

One of the differences was pronouncing the last letter of the alphabet as 's' or 't', hence 'shabbat' vs 'shabbos'; other differences concerned vowel sounds, for example.

I believe that for some reason, most people in Israel use one pronunciation and most Jews in America the other, hence two pronunciations for many things.