What's an inflection between friends?

Friday night, your host managed to discover that his hearing wasn't as bad as he was afraid. At the traditional Jewish Friday night services where he can usually be found, at least on Friday nights, he has been under the impression that perhaps he's singing something wrong.

There is an introductory song, dating to the 16th century, and sung at the beginning of these services, called "Yedid Nefesh". As SC is accustomed to it, the first stanza goes like so:

Y'did nefesh av harachaman, M'shoch avd'cha el r'tzonecha, Yarutz avd'cha k'mo ayal, Yishtachaveh el mul hadarecha, Ye-erav lo y'didotecha, Minofet tzuf v'chol ta-am.

However, because he has known it for roughly 20 years, he doesn't generally bother looking at the book while singing. So for the last year, he's been listening to this without realizing what's been going on:

Y’did nefesh av harachaman, m’shoch avdach el r’tzonach, Yarutz avdach k’mo ayal, yishtachaveh mul hadarach, Ki ye’erav lo y’didutach, minofet tzuf v’chol ta’am.

The non-Hebrew-speaking reader is wondering what the difference is; it's in the inflections on the nouns describing the speaker. The translation from the first link renders it as:

Companion of my soul, merciful Father, Bring Your servant close to Your will. Your servant will speed like a gazelle To bow down before Your glory. Your graviousness is like the nectar of honey, Choicest of flavor.

So what's going on? It's a change of gender: they're both "your X", but the "-cha" endings are masculine, while the "-ach" endings are feminine (in both cases, they're second-person).

This is not unlike alterations of other prayers which have been modified from, say, "avoteinu" (our fathers) to "avoteinu v'imoteinu" (our fathers and mothers), but with an important difference. In the latter case, the formula is well-known (at least among the relevant circles), and the authorship is lost to antiquity. Although it's obviously well-intentioned, the change of grammatical gender isn't noted in the book, which renders suspect notes like "composed by R. Azikri in the 1500s"; after all, what's on the page is no longer what was originally written.

Revising text to deal with changing norms is an issue fraught with ethical considerations. On the one hand, avoiding offense is a desirable goal. On the other hand, rewriting texts without acknowledging that it's even been done creates uncertainty over time about the reliability of manuscripts. Given that the change in question here affects a version of the text which many readers are unlikely to even appreciate (the change in gender isn't reflected in the English translation, where it's a nonissue), this strikes SC as a poor way to handle the goal of avoiding offense. Another strategy your host has seen involves preserving the original text, but including a translation reflecting current norms (obviously also inaccurate, but without violating the original text). This solution also strikes your host as rather less than desirable; SC is familiar with more than a few translation jobs where all male references are either neutered or untranslated, while all female references are properly translated. It may avoid offending people, but it certainly doesn't reflect the original content.

It's not clear to your host that there's a "good" way to deal with this. It's hard to imagine that editors of a purely secular text would ever intentionally edit older books in this style, at least without publishing notice that such changes had been made. This would seem to go double for writings held to represent the essentials of a religios belief. On the other hand, the prayer discussed above is just one of many in a service which has seen the introduction of much new material (and removal of other material) over the course of centuries to deal with changing beliefs and worldviews. If SC actually had a better answer for how to deal with this issue, though, he'd be writing the books, not reading them.

Comments

[language hat]

An interesting discussion of an interesting subject. But since I have nothing to add to it, I will merely point out that this reads as ungrammatical to me:
his hearing wasn't as bad as he was afraid.

Or rather, it's grammatical only if it's a comparison of the degree of his fear with the badness of his hearing. If it means what I suppose it to mean, in my dialect it would have to be
his hearing wasn't as bad as he feared.

Careless writing, or dialect difference?

[Semantic Compositions]

Dialect difference. I recognize the way you wrote it (which is equivalent to what I meant), but I wrote as I normally say it. Maybe. Google says I've only used "afraid" twice on this blog, and "as * was *" 7 times, but not in the same construction. So while I'm pretty sure that I normally say it that way, I don't have any corpus examples to point to.

[language hat]

Doesn't matter. If it sounds OK to you, we're talking dialect difference. Same, apparently, with the "some of whom having" construction I picked up from LL for LH. It's amazing how much clearer a picture we get of the variety of dialects out there with the internet. (I'm not always sure I'm glad of that; ignorance is bliss...)

[Olve Utne]

I'd like to point out that the -ákh endings in question are not feminine forms, but normal pausal forms of Biblical Hebrew as well as general (aramaicised) forms of Mishnaic and Rabbinic Hebrew -- and as such, they are the original forms of the pizmón "Yedid nefesh". The endings -èkha and -'khá are well-meant (but still destructive to the poetical meter as well as the literary style) "restorations" made by Ashkenazi grammarians centuries after Yedid nefesh was written.

SC was not spontaneously feminising. Rather, he was singing the original forms as they can still be found in reliable Sefaradí siddurim!