# Each of their lives



## hadronic

Hello,
I'm struggling on how to translate "each of their lives"? Each of their houses is כל אחד מביתם / מבתיהם, but כל אחד מחייהם doesn't work since חיים is plural and you can't (?) use אחד  which is singular.
How would you also say "one life, two lives, three lives" ?  חיים אחד, שני חיים, שלושה חיים? 
English requires the usage of "a piece of" for naturally plural nouns, but I'm not aware of any such device in Hebrew. 

Thank you.


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## arielipi

Your intuition is correct.
כל אחד מחייהם


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## origumi

You just can't say it directly in Hebrew. חיים is not countable. You can find other ways like תקופת חיים אחת, חיי אדם אחד or similar. כל אחד מחייהם sounds too weird and is not grammatical at all I think.

For example:
מתקפת הטרור בשרלי הבדו גבתה את חייהם של תריסר אנשים

And not:
מתקפת הטרור בשרלי הבדו גבתה תריסר חיים


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## Drink

origumi said:


> You just can't say it directly in Hebrew. חיים is not countable.



How would you say "Cats have nine lives"?


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## bazq

Drink said:


> How would you say "Cats have nine lives"?



We use נשמות "souls".

I agree חיים is a mass noun and cannot be quantified under number determiners.
חיים אחד, שני חיים etc are awkward and sound completely unnatural, perhaps ungrammatical. 
Origumi's examples are excellent.

You can think of שני חיים like "two sands" or "two waters" = they sound very bad.

There is a VERY restricted meaning of "שני חיים" I can think of, which is when you talk about how many "lives" you have left in a video game (how many times you can die until game over). Nevertheless, I feel these two versions of חיים are different (the difference being countable noun - non countable noun).


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## Drink

bazq said:


> We use נשמות "souls".



Interesting that it's not נפשות.



bazq said:


> I agree חיים is a mass noun and cannot be quantified under number determiners.
> חיים אחד, שני חיים etc are awkward and sound completely unnatural, perhaps ungrammatical.
> Origumi's examples are excellent.
> 
> You can think of שני חיים like "two sands" or "two waters" = they sound very bad.



The problem for us to understand this is that in English, you _can_ say these things. Any mass noun can be forced into a countable usage. "Two sands" can mean "two types of sand" or "two areas of sand", for example.



bazq said:


> There is a VERY restricted meaning of "שני חיים" I can think of, which is when you talk about how many "lives" you have left in a video game (how many times you can die until game over). Nevertheless, I feel these two versions of חיים are different (the difference being countable noun - non countable noun).



Why not use נשמות for this, like for cats?


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## hadronic

How do you say "I only have one life left"   נשאר לי רק חיים אחד? or חי אחד?


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## arielipi

Ah, talking about that...
ההצעה שלי:
חיי כל אחד מהם
החיים של כל...

לגבי השאלה של הדרוניק, חיים אחד


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## origumi

In the Bible we can find ועשרת אלפים חיים. But this may be an adjective (participle) or a biblical equivalent to "souls". And it doesn't work well in the modern language.


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## bazq

Drink said:


> Interesting that it's not נפשות.
> 
> 
> 
> The problem for us to understand this is that in English, you _can_ say these things. Any mass noun can be forced into a countable usage. "Two sands" can mean "two types of sand" or "two areas of sand", for example.
> 
> 
> 
> Why not use נשמות for this, like for cats?



Yes, exactly. "two sands" are two types of sand. This is the case in Hebrew too, and in many other languages, it is NOT "two sands".
שני בשרים in Hebrew (and in English too) means "two types of meat", not "two "meats" " in the sense of "two pencils". 

Regarding נשמות not used - I think I've heard it being said about lives in video games, but it's simply uncommon.
Why a certain word is preferred by speakers over another, even if it means changing its semantics? - excellent question, but I'm afraid I do not hold the answer for it  .


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