# בלי/מבלי/ללא מניין



## TamidTalmid

I’m writing בלי/מבלי/ללא מניין in my notes concerning the Sh’ma, but given these three choices I’m not sure which sounds most natural or would be most appropriate. My gut says “ללא” but I have no earthly idea why. Sometimes intuition is a wonderful utility in linguistics, but the specificity of this particular inquiry leads me to be skeptical of whatever my gut is telling me.

I understand ללא is more like “with no” while the other two are “without”, but maybe there’s more to it. We have bye and goodbye in English which I’d argue are completely interchangeable, yet goodbye originated as a contraction for “god be with you”, so who knows? Maybe there’s a story behind that מ seemingly added to בלי or a shortening of מבלי to בלי. If there is such an explanation for this divergence/evolution, I’d love to know it.

I searched for a thread to answer my question and what I found I mostly already knew. בלי is the more common way to say without, מבלי is slightly less common but functions in the same way, but ללא apparently is used in fixed expressions and is more formal. I didn’t know ללא was commonly found in fixed expressions. With that said, I’ve heard ללא in modern Israeli music; an example that comes to mind is hearing ״ללא סיבה״ in some hip hop song whose title I can’t remember. Perhaps that IS a fixed expression or a part of one. Regardless, I’m not at all sure which of the three words would be most natural to choose when writing “without a quorum” in the context I’ve provided.

Could anyone tell me which word they might choose and why they would choose one over the others? I’d appreciate it. Thank you.


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## Abaye

For such an issue, Google is your friend.

ללא מניין shows 6310 results.
בלי מניין show 2950 results.
בלא מניין shows 503 results.
מבלי מניין shows 4 results.

(wrap the word-pair with "quotes" when searching in Google).


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## TamidTalmid

Abaye said:


> For such an issue, Google is your friend.
> 
> ללא מניין shows 6310 results.
> בלי מניין show 2950 results.
> בלא מניין shows 503 results.
> מבלי מניין shows 4 results.
> 
> (wrap the word-pair with "quotes" when searching in Google).


My apologies, but this was the first thing I tried which was a natural move for me, being rather used to using google to teach myself different subjects including Hebrew. However, I’m only on mobile and because my browser has elected not to show me the numbers of search results for my searches, if I wanted an answer I had to ask an actual person. Perhaps there’s some kind of setting that can be adjusted to show the number of results that come up when terms are searched, but I’ve never seen that setting.

All the same, thanks for providing an answer.


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## amikama

It depends on the context, but generally speaking, in modern Hebrew בלי and ללא are preferred before nouns, while מבלי rarely comes before a noun. (מבלי is commonly followed by an infinitive, e.g. מבלי לצעוק.) Therefore, I'd go with either בלי מניין or ללא בניין, but not מבלי מניין.


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## TamidTalmid

amikama said:


> It depends on the context, but generally speaking, in modern Hebrew בלי and ללא are preferred before nouns, while מבלי rarely comes before a noun. (מבלי is commonly followed by an infinitive, e.g. מבלי לצעוק.) Therefore, I'd go with either בלי מניין or ללא בניין, but not מבלי מניין.


Thank you for the detailed answer. I thought there had to be some more nuance to it all.

Though I now feel compelled to ask is it permissible to use בלי before an infinitive as well? Could I get away with saying בלי לכתוב? Or should I only _ever_ use מבלי before infinitives?

That distinction should be easy enough for me to remember just since מ acts as a prefix in so many verb conjugations. I’ll be able to easily associate it with use in sentences using infinitives.

Again, thank you.


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## duhveer

I seem to think that the most natural form (in this day and age) and would be understood is "ללא--" as in "ללא מניין".
"בלי" however seems a bit customary and rather general- given that, one wouldn't use this word when writing synagogue-relating texts. *(In my opinion of course).*


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## TamidTalmid

duhveer said:


> I seem to think that the most natural form (in this day and age) and would be understood is "ללא--" as in "ללא מניין".
> "בלי" however seems a bit customary and rather general- given that, one wouldn't use this word when writing synagogue-relating texts. *(In my opinion of course).*


Yeah, that was the sense I had too, but it wasn’t informed by much. Thank you for the input.


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## amikama

TamidTalmid said:


> Though I now feel compelled to ask is it permissible to use בלי before an infinitive as well? Could I get away with saying בלי לכתוב? Or should I only _ever_ use מבלי before infinitives?


Both can come before infinitives:
בלי לכתוב
מבלי לכתוב
(The latter sounds a bit more formal to me than the former.)


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## Abaye

Repeating my previous message yet trying not to bore: attempting to tell what's the more likely way natives would say something (in case that more than one alternative makes sense), the reasonable way is to collect data and run some kind of statistical analysis.
You can ask the forum participants and get like 10 answers, but this is too small a number and apparently not a representative sample. Search Engines are notorious for providing misleading info and yet I see no better, easy approach.


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