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Idioms and Well-Wishing

Living in a country speaking one language, and spending lots of time dealing with another one, has it’s problems. Like the tendency to borrow phrases and idioms.

I have a friend who has a big university test tomorrow. So naturally I wanted to wish my friend good luck. I speak Hebrew with this friend, like I do with most of them. But I read in English all the time, write in English a lot, and get to speak a decent amount of time in English.

The result of which was that during conversation I wished my friend "Mazal Tov". "Mazal" is the Hebrew word for luck, and "Tov" is good. It felt very natural to say good luck during the conversation.

There is one big problem, though. In Hebrew the "Mazal Tov" combination is chiefly, heck – always, used in a meaning equivalent to congratulations. Wishing someone a good luck is done by saying "Behatzlacha", which can be roughly translated as with success.

My friend was understandably miffed that instead of wishing good luck, I gave congratulations for success. Since it’s a hard test, and success is not assured, this was not taken very nicely.

Of course once I explained everything was alright… Now I just need to decide if it means I’m using too much English, or if it means I should just pay more attention to what I say…

January 4th, 2005 at 23:04 EET | Categories: Language | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Idioms and Well-Wishing”

  1. Micah says:
    June 22nd, 2006 at 22:10

    that’s really good to know. I’ve been studying Hebrew and almost ran into that problem myself!

    Todah,
    Micah

  2. Post author comments:
    June 25th, 2006 at 14:55

    If I helped in anything, you’re certainly most welcome.

    But you at least have an excuse. As a non native-speaker people speaking with you will often tend to automatically see if there are other sensible meaning to what you say, when what you actually say seems irrelevant. So in this particular example you will be perfectly understood.

    I, as a native speaker, am not expected to use idioms from another language while speaking Hebrew.
    Still, as long as I understand myself, I’m OK with it. ;-)

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