Trendy American words are quickly incorporated into Israeli Hebrew and cherished by the media gossips. They are taken from the English, as seleb (בלס) “celeb,” or selebrita’it for “female celebrity;” a formal Hebrew synonym is yedua’nit (less common).
Eqsit takes informal English ex, meaning “ex (wife),” and adds the Hebrew feminine suffix -it. Other examples are studentit for “female student,” seqsit for “sexy female,” qulit for “cool female.”
*Spelling foreign words in Hebrew requires that all K sounds — whether from X, K, Q, C — are spelled with the Hebrew quf (ק = q), for example, meqsiqo is “Mexico,” sheqispir is “Shakespeare,” qolombus “Columbus,” qvarts “quartz,” qumunist “communist.” An exception is aleksander “Alexander,” which uses a kaf.
Yona Sabar is a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic in the department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA.
