Nuances: Plenty or A Lot
One aspect of learning a language that is tremendously difficult is the nuance between words that are casually translated the same way. For instance, the words המון (hamon) and הרבה (’arbay) are both translated as a lot or many or a plurality; they signify quite a hefty amount and one carries the connotation of a greater amount than the other.
Depending on the Israeli that is asked, the reason you would use one instead of the other can be any number of reasons. הרבה is a smaller quantity than המון and הרבה is quantifiable – it can be counted – whereas המון is a massive amount that isn’t countable. Ask another Israeli and the explanation for the usage and meaning of the words can be quite different.
In a sense, it’s like the English words “a lot” and “plenty”. When to use the words are left to the speaker; “I have a lot of potatoes” and “There are plenty of potatoes” can essentially mean the same thing. The nuance between the two is slight; having a lot of potatoes means to have more than a few – an indeterminate number – whereas having plenty of potatoes means to have more than a sufficient amount.
Additionally, the roots of “a lot” and “plenty” are different. “A lot” is an Anglo-Saxon word that refers to a plot of land and is generally considered to be bad form by high school English teachers. “Plenty” is from Latin and denotes sufficiency, satience. It shares the root with the word “plenum” which is a full assembly or a container filled with matter (in opposition to a vaccum). So, looking beneath the common use of the words reveals subtle differences in meaning. “A lot” is a fixed amount of space whereas “plenty” implies fullness and sufficiency.
הרבה has a similar root with רבה and רבים which, in turn, mean “a lot” or “many” – as in “many thanks” or “thanks a lot” – and רבים is used as plural. I’ve no clue from where המון comes; the associative words imply an unquantified mass. The words for “mob”, “multitudes” and other massive and undefined entities that also carry with them a sense of chaos.
In day-to-day Hebrew and maybe even in printed Hebrew, these distinctions are probably not noted. The nuances are difficult to grasp as a non-native speaker. The same awkward and forced sentences that non-native English speakers speak, I must also be making in Hebrew; it is exceedinly frustrating to not know whether to use המון or הרבה specifically and Hebrew words generally makes learning a language difficult. One hopes that with time and conversation, the concerns about nuance fade and the language becomes more natural and fluid.