So far I have mixed feelings about the "fairy tales" in the First Hebrew Primer. It's been excellent for getting students reading texts as quickly as possible. But I just can't agree with providing ungrammatical input... I'm gonna have to write my own

Sadly not :(

I see the earth--bupkes! And I saw the heavens--double bupkes!

Nu in the start of the creating the things, the earth, it was all fakakte!

I see it as a fair compromise, sacrificing the syntax & rhyme of the nonsense noun but maintaining its function as an intensifying collocation. Alter's 'welter' works wonderfully to bring out the rhyming pattern, but it leans more towards 'waste' in the sense of 'wasted/lost/useless'.

That's why I like "barren waste(land)". Barren forms a natural collocation that heightens the sense of waste(land), mirroring the hendiadys of תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ in an organic way. It also doubly emphasizes that תֹּהוּ has an earthly, geographic sense and not some pre-creation 'chaos' or 'void'.

I guess "waste shwaste" would've been a little too on the nose...

begins with a barren land without vegetation or rainfall. And it brings out a potentially significant contrast in Gen 1 between primordial ocean and primordial desert, which is totally overshadowed by more abstract translations like 'void' and 'chaos'.

Whoah, did not know that! My preference for it is simply that תֹּהוּ is used elsewhere to refer to 1) uninhabited desert and 2) futility or vanity. 'Waste' is an excellent English match in both senses. Describing the early earth as a wasteland also lines up with the creation account in Gen 2, which

Turns out no, he's not alone-- 'waste', imo the best English rendition of תֹּהוּ, shows up in some pretty unexpected places:

ASV, YLT: "waste and void"
Darby: "waste and empty"
TLV: "chaos and waste"

My personal take on תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ would be 'barren waste(land)'

He does תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ as 'waste and welter' which I find astoundingly good

Not to my knowledge. It looks like a straightforward combination of /b/ (inanimate marker) + /(n)a/ (dative marker), that's what we learned from Jagersma. But it's clearly been syntactically reanalyzed, since sometimes /ba-/ can co-occur with other dative prefixes on the verb.

Most of the time when we see it in class my teacher just says to ignore it entirely because it's just that vague. He suggested something about it maybe having some sort of function in discourse structure, too, but IDK the details. But it's a very, very frequent morpheme on verbs.

No one can agree exactly what it is or does. I haven't formed my own opinion about it but sometimes it seems like a passive or mediopassive marker, sometimes like a 3sg.inan.dat., and sometimes it seems interchangeable with other morphemes like /mu/ and /i₃/ whose functions are themselves unclear

Very smart people ask me for my opinion about problems and then I give my opinion about the problem and they nod and say "That was a good opinion" and modify the project accordingly because these people who are all smarter than me value my input? And I pay my rent with this?

My boss hands me some ancient text that I love and I make some annotations about it and he says "hmm I see very good" and gives me dollars? What sorcery is this

Me: "I just really don't want to learn to speak German...."
My gf: "But you already speak Yiddish."
Me: "That's the worst part, I speak German!"

Oh snap!! I had no idea, very cool!