how to say “white night” in Hebrew
[audioclip url=”https://archive.ulpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/לילה-לבן-#.m4a” /]לַיְלָה לָבָן
I didn’t know what a white night was until I came to live in Israel, where there’s an annual all-night event in Tel Aviv, the White City. A white night refers to a sleepless night or a night that is never fully dark such as those in summer in high latitudes.
In Hebrew, this is לילה לבן[audioclip url=”https://archive.ulpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/לילה-לבן-#.m4a” /], as in:
[audioclip url=”https://archive.ulpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/לילה-לבן-#.m4a” /]יש לילה לבן בעיר – יהיו הרבה מסיבות.
There’s a white night in the city – there’ll be lots of parties.
לילה לבן is a reminder that what people like to think of as grammar rules, observations by linguists of the behavior of a language, almost always have exceptions: לילה[audioclip url=”https://archive.ulpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/לילה-לבן-#.m4a” /] “should” be feminine, since it has the ה-[audioclip url=”https://archive.ulpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/לילה-לבן-#.m4a” /] ending, but it’s actually a masculine noun.
