Mortgage

Mortgage or mortgage? By the time I finished writing my book, the answer was clear to me. It should be written 'משכנתא' and in the plural 'משכנתאות'. Spoiler: I was wrong.

The book's editor decided to take out a mortgage.ה And not mortgagedא according to Academy of the Hebrew Language The Academy of the Hebrew Language has no Hebrew name. Feminine nouns that came from Aramaic or Greek, such as "kufs"ה Or tabletה It must end with 'ה' and not "א".

No need for a workshopה, Take yourselves a breakה And before closing the dealה Check if this worksה  Or just versionה Mortgageה Writing in H'.

So why do we write mortgage with an 'alef"?

So if a mortgage needs to be written with a 'Heh' and not an 'Aleph," why do banks and the general public write it with an "Aleph"? The biggest influences on our language are not the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The biggest influences, as strange as it may seem, are corporations whose native language is not Hebrew at all: Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

As long as Microsoft continues to flag the word "mortgage" as a typo in redה  With the 'ה', people think it's wrong. Microsoft has advanced and in Word you can write 'משכנתא' without it being flagged as an error (unlike Chrome with which I am writing this post), but 'משכנתא'ה with an additional letter such as on mortgage Will be marked as normal compared to Mortgage  May it be correct.

And how are Google and Facebook related to this? They are the largest advertising engines in the world. Every business owner who advertises on these platforms writes down appropriate areas of interest and search terms for their ad. The more people search for mortgagesא So website owners create ads for this word on one hand and write their articles with mortgages on the otherא  On the other hand, for them to suit public taste. And so the mistake feeds itself again and again. It would have been possible to demand from the banks, at the very least, to write in standard Hebrew, but on the other hand, there are more important things that can be demanded from banks, such as presenting a real mortgage calculation. Including reference to the index or the cessation of the scaremongering Early repayment penalty And they do not do it.

In Aramaic from the language of the Sages: "And behold, a mortgage without a deduction, for in their [the Sages"] courts, they collect from the creditor to the debtor, and in our courts, we do not return from the creditor to the debtor!"

Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bava Metzia, Page 62a-b.

"We will skip the deliberations involved in selling an apartment and acquiring a new one: running from institution to institution and warming benches in corridors; the signatures on endless papers, written in the squiggly style of lawyers; the commitment to mortgaged interest, which creates large holes in salary payments – for months and years; and the sheer chaos of moving from apartment to apartment."

From the book Chayah's Garden by Avraham Regelson

Avraham Regelson was born in 1896 in Lughosk, Minsk, Russia, and immigrated to the United States as a child. He studied in New York's "East Side" in a cheder, a yeshiva, and New York public schools. He served as a librarian and teacher in Hebrew schools in New York and Cleveland, Ohio. He made aliyah in 1933, but after three years returned to New York. A master of Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, he wrote poetry and prose in all three languages, which were published in both countries. In 1949, he settled in Israel permanently. His works include several volumes of poetry, essays, Children's books, many articles, and Hebrew translations of English classical poetry and fine literature. Awarded the Brenner Prize (1964) and the Bialik Prize (1972) for literature, he also received the Newman Prize from the Hebrew Department of New York University (NYU) in 1976 for his contribution to Hebrew literature. He passed away in 1981.

If you've read this far, you deserve a free chapter from my book, Mishkan.ה Efficient