If You're Happy and You Know It (biblical Hebrew songs, cont'd)

So, mostly what I've been doing is supporting my faculty colleagues in their transition from Blackboard to our new Moodle learning management system.

But, partly what I've been doing is continuing with the biblical Hebrew resources in my series, "A Foundation for Biblical Hebrew," a series that uses communicative learning tools as a supplement to an elementary biblical Hebrew curriculum.

This is, "If You're Happy and You Know It." Some points I had to work through, and on which I welcome feedback:

• I decided that being happy and knowing it was best expressed with perfect verbs joined by we-gam.


• I decided to use the masculine plural pronoun suffixes; sorry, but there's just no room in the song for a more up-to-date solution to the problem of gender inclusivity. In English, I usually use the feminine singular as the "representative human" ("each student must see to her own work").


• "Let your lives show it": going with the jussive here, naturally, verb-subject.


• For the commands, I abandon personal pronouns: "clap a palm"; "stomp a foot"; etc. Again, only so much room in the scansion. This—leaving pronominal suffixes off of body parts where they are the objects of verbs—accords well enough with biblical usage (Psa 47:1; cf. Isa 37:22; but Ezek 6:11).


• Main learning points: body parts, the masculine plural imperative, the masculine plural pronominal suffixes -tem and -kem; the conditional particle ʾim.

Feedback encourages, as always.



[If You're Happy and You Know It (biblical Hebrew songs, cont'd) was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/09/12. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]