# בא לי



## ahshav

Does anyone know the origin of this phrase? I didn't think much of it until I came across this thread in the Arabic forum (forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1239301) - those of you who might speak Arabic (mine's not great, to say the least) - do you think there is a connection?


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## Nunty

Does it mean the same thing in Arabic?


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## origumi

elroy said:


> בא לי literally means "it comes to me."
> بالي literally means "my mind" (بال = "mind"; ـي = "my").


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## Nunty

So there is no relation at all. Why would you think there is?


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## Flaminius

I still wonder whence the idiom בא לי.  Maybe it is a calque from another language?  Does Arabic has a dialect where the construction "It comes to me that..." means "I want to do..."?  How about Yiddish?


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## origumi

I tried to find the origin of בא לי but with no luck. It seems to have deep roots in the Hebrew slang for decades and yet hasn't been dealt with in slang dictionaries (such as Roovik Rosental's, 2005).

* Doesn't sound like military slang (the main source of Hebrew colloquialisms), therefore less likely to arrive from Arabic
* Doesn't sound like provincial newspapers (מקומונים) slang 
* One of the first words that toddlers bring home from pre-school to shock their mothers
* A symbol of vulgar, uncultured, lazy language
* Sometimes used as מתאים לי ("suits me"), for example in זה בא לי טוב

I can only guess that בא לי emerged from nowhere, maybe during the 70s, and by its simplicity won over its predecessor מתחשק לי.

The gates of public media opened for בא לי thanks to שיר הפריחה ("the freikha song", where "freikha" is a colloquial [borrowed from Arabic "young hen" I think] for young, noisy, under-motivated, uneducated girl of oriental origin).

A better Hebrew match for the Arabic expression mentioned above is בראש שלי ("in my head"), meaning similar to בא לי, which was popular during the 90s and early 00s.


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## elroy

The full expression in Arabic is جاي على بالي, which literally translates to something like בה לראש שלי, so the Arabic expression contains the "בה" element as well.

It's just that בא לי and بالي are not etymologically related despite phonetic similarity, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two _expressions_ were related somehow (i.e. if one gave rise to the other).


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## scriptum

ahshav said:


> Does anyone know the origin of this phrase? I didn't think much of it until I came across this thread in the Arabic forum (forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1239301) - those of you who might speak Arabic (mine's not great, to say the least) - do you think there is a connection?


The only origin I can think of is the french expression "il me convient de + inf". = _It pleases me to_, or _I would accept to_ + inf. The same expression (with a little change of meaning) exists in Spanish: _me conviene_ + inf. Since _venir_ is לבוא, one may guess that בא לי is a somewhat awkward translation from French, Spanish or Ladino.


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## BezierCurve

> still wonder whence the idiom בא לי. Maybe it is a calque from another language?


 
There are 2 corresponding phrases in Polish "naszlo mnie" or "doszlo do mnie", first meaning an idea/inspiration, the second one meaning to realize something. Both verbs correspond to "come" (lit. it came to me). There are many more idiomatic expressions which are common to both languages, so it is quite possible that this is one of them. There is also possibility of some expression close to it in Russian.


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## BezierCurve

Actually, if this expression was coined in 70's, it would correspond to the Jewish migration from Poland after March 1968, so it makes some sense.


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## kopo

BezierCurve said:


> There is also possibility of some expression close to it in Russian.



The Russian expression is "пришло в голову" (_came into the head_, i.e. _got the idea to_). It's very commonly used -- try searching for it in quotes on Google.

For example:
"Мне пришло в голову пойти сегодня в кино."
"I got the idea to go to the movies today."
Literally: "It came to me into the head to go to the movies today."

Considering Israel's Russian-speaking population through the generations, and the prevalence in Israeli Hebrew of idiomatic expressions borrowed from Russian, I would actually argue that this is the most likely source of בא לי.

Arabic seems to be more a source of individual words than longer expressions.


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## BezierCurve

> The Russian expression is "пришло в голову"


 
Yes, there is Polish one with a head too (przyszlo mi do glowy). Just thought the other one was closer (the one without).


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