Dear Iranians: Hebrew Language Academy corrects Iranian poster threatening Israel

The Academy of the Hebrew Language corrected the Hebrew spelling on an Iranian poster threatening Israel in a post to Facebook on Thursday.

The poster called on America to ditch Israel and "throw them away like used toilet paper."

However, the Academy noticed a spelling mistake in the poster. The word used in the poster for you (plural) was "אותכם," however as the Academy noted, this spelling is incorrect; the correct spelling is "אתכם." 

"We apologize for the pettiness (that's how we are), but we would appreciate it if, from now on, you would make sure to write you and not 'you.'"

The Academy reassured the Iranians that this was a common mistake and that "Many get it wrong; you are not alone."

They explain that the present and the present participle differ from the other inflectional forms of the word 'you,' in which the holam is not present.

This is not the first time the Academy has raised this issue. In 2018, they discussed why the spelling is "אתכם" and not "אותכם." 

The reason is that the first spelling appears over 300 times throughout the Tanakh while the second spelling is a hapax legomenon, only appearing once (Joshua 23:15) in the entirety of the Tanakh.

What is the Hebrew Language Academy?

The Academy of the Hebrew Language is the supreme institution for scholarship on the Hebrew language and has the final word on what is and what isn't correct in Hebrew vocabulary, grammar, writing, spelling, and transliteration.

The Academy traces its origins to institutions created by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who helped popularize the Hebrew language as the primary language of the zionist movement and helped to revive it as a spoken native language for the first time in nearly 2000 years.

The Academy and its pre-state ancestor institutions were responsible for helping revive Hebrew through the creation of new words and producing educational material for teaching new speakers.

Unlike English, which never developed a single institution to regulate the use of the English Language, instead developing a decentralized group of institutions (Oxford English Dictionary, Meriam-Webster, etc), Hebrew, like many other modern languages (French, Italian, Spanish), have a single centralized language academy to update and modernize the language.