kusemet

In the previous post, we mentioned se'ora שעורה - "barley", so this is a good opportunity to finish the discussion of the five grains of the Land of Israel. There's not much to say about the etymology of se'ora other than to quote Klein who says that it's related to se'ar שער - "hair", and literally means "the hairy or bearded (grain)".
Chita חיטה - "wheat" also has a fairly simple explanation. Klein points out that it probably derives from the root חנט, meaning "to ripen" (with a dropped nun). And we've already discussed shibolet shual שבולת שועל - "oats" and shifon שיפון - "rye" (at least according to their use in modern Hebrew.) What's left? Kusemet כוסמת.

As with shibolet shual and shifon, the identity of kusemet isn't clear. The word appears in the Bible (Shemot 9:32, Yeshayahu 28:25, Yechezkel 4:9) and in the Talmudic literature. The medieval rabbis generally identified it as spelt, but the current scholarly opinion is that it was more likely emmer wheat (unlike emmer, spelt has not been found in Egypt and the Land of Israel in archeological excavations of biblical sites). The name probably comes from the root כסם - "to shear, clip", and "the names derives from the short hairs of the ears which look as though they have been cut" (Encyclopedia Judaica, "Wheat"). However, with kusemet there's an added twist: in Modern Hebrew the word means "buckwheat". Unlike shibolet shual and shifon, there's no halachic opinion that buckwheat is one of the five grains (with all of the laws relating to them). So how did this come to be?

I couldn't find any clear answers, but after a lot of research, I believe I have a possible theory.

First of all, it's important to note that this wasn't an invention of Ben Yehuda. In fact, his dictionary doesn't mention the identification of kusemet with buckwheat at all (even to reject it). I did find it in three different sources from 19th century Haskala writers. Mendele Mocher Sfarim in 1862 (Toldot HaTeva) and Moshe Studentzky in 1853 (Orchot Chaim) both use the word kusemet as buckwheat in “scientific” definitions, as well as an earlier use by a Jewish convert to Christianity, Aaron Pick, in 1845.  I have no reason to believe they were all influenced by one common contemporary source - and if it exists, I couldn't find it.

So I think it was probably more likely that these various sources were all inspired by common usage (Jewish or non-Jewish). Here the trail goes cold, but I think there are certain hints about what might have led them to this translation.

If we go all the way back to the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, we see that kusemet was translated as "far". Interestingly, far, at the time, could mean either spelt or emmer (the confusion continues to this day). But later, far came to mean grain in general. The Vulgate was the main influence for pre-Lutheran bibles, written in Low German, which weren't known for their scholarship. Some of them translated kusemet as boekwete, the German word for buckwheat. (Luther translated kusemet as spelt, and his translation became the standard in Germany after his Reformation, and supplanted those earlier bibles.)

Low German is closely related to Dutch, and here we get a few more clues. There are two legends in Holland about buckwheat. One is that buckwheat was first brought to Europe from the Holy Land by Joos van Ghistele in 1485, and the other is a folk etymology mentioned in a number of sources, such as Bert Greene in The Grains Cookbook (page 56):

It was the Dutch who gave buckwheat its rightful name. In 1549 the officially dubbed it boek weit (book wheat) to honor the Scriptures whose auspices, they claimed, brought it to flower on their shores.

Neither of the above is likely true (buckwheat was never found widely in the Land of Israel, and the correct etymology is "beech wheat", since buckwheat seeds and beech seeds look similar). But that's not terribly relevant to our search - if people in that area thought that buckwheat was a biblical grain from the Holy Land, then it makes sense that when they found a strange word in the Bible, which they understood as just meaning "grain", they would connect the two. And so therefore kusemet could go from far to boekweit, and if this association continued for a few more centuries, then Jews could make buckwheat into kusemet.

And this is apparently what happened, for in addition to the Haskala sources I found, the Aruch HaShulchan (Orach Chaim 208:18¹) writes in the 19th century that most people knew that buckwheat was not one of the five grains. The fact that he needed to point that out is a sign that there was already wide use in Europe of kusemet as buckwheat.

As we mentioned, Ben Yehuda made no reference to this usage. And in halachic literature, kusemet continued to refer to spelt. But even heavyweights such as these didn't have control over the living language of Modern Hebrew. And the language seemed to come up with a solution of its own, and a strange on at that. Kusemet continued to be used for buckwheat, but the plural, kusmin כוסמין, was reserved for spelt - and you can actually find the two next to each other in the supermarket, even produced by the same company.

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1. See also Igrot Moshe, Yoreh Deah, 2:25 and Kehati's commentary on Hallah 1:1 for more recent halachic responses to the confusion regarding the meanings of kussemet.

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ish and isha

The first words the Torah quotes Adam as saying appear right after his wife was created. He gives her a name, but also mentions a connection between his name and hers:

וַיֹּאמֶר, הָאָדָם, זֹאת הַפַּעַם עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי, וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי; לְזֹאת יִקָּרֵא אִשָּׁה, כִּי מֵאִישׁ לֻקְחָה-זֹּאת.

Then the man said, "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman (isha) for from man (ish) she was taken". (Bereshit 2:23)

As you might imagine, I love the idea that the first recorded human sentence include an etymology! Ibn Ezra says that the words ish איש and isha אשה are related, and Rashi goes even further. Based on the midrash in Bereshit Rabba (18:4), he says that from this verse we learn that the world was created in Hebrew!

However, there are a few difficulties with what we've said so far. First of all, almost all modern linguists say that ish and isha aren't related. Ish comes from the root אוש, meaning strength (the related root אשש means "to strengthen"), and isha derives from אנש, meaning weak. (The common plural of both - anashim אנשים - "men" and nashim - נשים - "women" also derive from אנש). Aside from the fact that the Torah mentions them together, it might seem difficult to believe that they aren't from the same root. We see the letter heh added as a feminine suffix in many words. Why shouldn't we accept what appears to be the obvious etymology here as well?

Well, first of all, we should be careful of "obvious" etymologies. I've warned a number of times of the danger of assuming that words in English and Hebrew that have similar sounds and meanings are related. But we need to be just as careful when it comes to words in the same language. My friend Mike Gerver has a list of false cognates in English, with pairs of words that most people would find it hard to believe aren't from the same root: for example, pull and pulley, isle and island. I would add to this list one very relevant to our topic: male and female!

Secondly, it's important to note the the woman is receiving a name here. We see many times that the etymology of names given in the Torah does not match up exactly with the linguistic etymologies. For example, the Torah connects the name Noach נח with the root נחם, even though the two aren't connected. (For a good analysis of this phenomenon, read this post on Parshablog.)

But perhaps most significantly, there's a grammatical problem here as well. The word isha has a dagesh in the shin. Ibn Ezra says this is to distinguish it from the homonym ishah -"her husband." Modern linguists, however, have shown that this dagesh is due to the "dropped nun" phenomenon (see other examples here.) In addition, the shin in ish and the shin in isha aren't really cognate. Horowitz writes (page 107):

Strange and unbelievable as it seems the word אשה has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the word איש. In אשה in the first place a nun has fallen out; the word is really אנשה (insha). The plural נשים gives some hint of that. The really important fact, though, is that the shin of אשה is really a tav. In Aramaic the word for woman is either אתא or more commonly אתתא.

Klein points out that there is an Aramaic form אנתתא, as well as the Arabic אנתת, which show both the dropped nun and the tav instead of shin.

A number of modern Jewish commentaries deal with the apparent conflict between the verse in Bereshit and the currently accepted etymologies. Sarna writes in the JPS Genesis:

Hebrew 'ishah ... 'ish, though actually derived from distinct and unrelated stems, are here associated through folk etymology by virtue of assonance.

Kil in the Daat Mikra in a footnote (with no apologetics) writes that ish is from אוש and isha is from אשש, whereas the plural of both comes from אנש. Cassuto makes a similar comment, but has isha coming from the root אנת / אנש as we've mentioned above.

Probably the earliest "modern" commentator that I could find who dealt with the issue was Shadal. He wrote:

Moses recorded these words as they were pronounced in his time, even though ishah was not actually derived from ish, but rather from enash, which became enesh (as gevar became gever), yielding the plural anashim, as well as the feminine form inshah, which became ishah. The word ish, however, has been preserved in its original form.

Now while I'm generally willing to explore any resource in order to find the history of words on this site, I was a little nervous going forward here. I needed to present an "unbelievable" etymology, and it seems to contradict a verse in the Torah! And from conversations with friends, I had the feeling that my "modern" commentators weren't going to cut it.

So I was relieved when I found that the Radak in his Sefer HaShorashim (entry אנש) wrote that:

ואפשר שתהיה אשה מזה השרש והדגש לחסרון הנו"ן והראוי אנשה

"And it is possible that isha is from this root (אנש) and the dagesh is due to the missing nun, and it is properly אנשה"

So we have some early grammatical proof. (By the way, I'm not sure if the Radak was the first one to come up with the אנשה theory - it was just the earliest I could find. If anyone has any other sources, I'd be glad to see them.) However, it doesn't entirely satisfy the issue. Rashi's quote from the midrash above still stands - aren't we supposed to learn something about the role of Hebrew from this verse?

Let's look a little closer at what Rashi wrote:

לשון נופל על לשון. מכאן שנברא העולם בלשון הקודש

Most of the English translations of Rashi imply that he's referring to an etymological connection between ish and isha. For example, this site translates it as:

[The words איש and אשה ] have the same root. From this [we derive] that the world was created with the Holy Tongue.

Another site has a similar translation:

One expression coincides with the other [i. e., the words אִישׁ and words אִשָּׁה have the same root]. From here is derived that the world was created with the Holy Tongue.

However, these are not precise translations of Rashi's language. He does not say that the words are from the root - he says "lashon nofel al lashon" - which means a play on words or a pun (literally "one expression falls on another expression"). We find this term in a related midrash in Bereshit Rabba (31:8). The midrash notes that God told Moshe to make a seraph (Bamidbar 21:8). Moshe, however, makes a copper snake - a נחש נחושת - nachash nechoshet (21:9). His reason for doing so was that this was lashon nofel al lashon - the words nachash and nechoshet resemble each other. And here too, the midrash learns from this that the world was created in Hebrew.

I think anyone reading that midrash alone would not assume that nachash and nechoshet are related etymologically (they're not, by the way, but that's for a different post). So perhaps here too, we don't need to assume that ish and isha are related etymologically by virtue of them being lashon nofel al lashon.

I think this point was well explained by Rabbi Yitzchak Arama, author of Akedat Yitzhak (chapter 8). He writes there that ish and isha do not have the same root. He connects ish to strength, but curiously does not present the etymology of isha. He distinguishes ish and isha from other animals where the female is marked by a heh suffix, such as par פר -"bull" and parah פרה - "cow", keves כבש -"lamb" and kivsa כבשה - "ewe", and more. (This is contrast to the Chizkuni on 2:23 who writes that humans are the only species that the terms for male and female come from the same root. How he missed the numerous examples where it does occur, I don't know.)

He then points out something very important about the concept of lashon nofel al lashon. He quotes the midrash that Rashi quoted above, and writes:

ומההכרח להיות כוונתם ז"ל מה שאמרנו שאל"כ מאי קאמרי שהוא לשון נופל על לשון והלא לשון אחד ממש הוא כמו פר ופרה כבש וכבשה

"And this must have been their intention (when they wrote the midrash), as we said (that the words come from different roots). For if not, then what does it mean, 'lashon nofel al lashon' - for is it only one lashon (expression), like par and parah, keves and kivsa?"

So from the Akedat Yitzhak's reading (which I think makes a lot of sense), the midrash and Rashi actually support the idea that ish and isha aren't etymologically related.

One other thing bothered me about the midrash. Not only does it say that the world was created in Hebrew, but it uses the proof from the verse that the Torah was given in Hebrew:

From here you learn that the Torah was given in Hebrew. R. Pinchas and R. Chilkiya in the name of R. Simon: Just as the Torah was given in Hebrew, so too was the world created in Hebrew. Have you ever heard gini ginia, anthrope anthropia, gavra gavreta? Rather ish and isha. Why so? For they are similar sounding words (lashon nofel al lashon).

The midrash is showing how in Greek and Aramaic the words for male and female are not related at all - there are no such words in Greek as gini and anthropia, nor gavreta in Aramaic. (This "proof" doesn't work as well in English, were we have the related "man" and "woman", but it does allow the English translation of Bereshit 2:23 to duplicate the assonance.)

But why would anyone even assume that the Torah was written in another language? I think we need to pay attention to the linguistic pluralism facing the Jews in the land of Israel at the time of the midrash (R' Simon lived in 3rd century Lod.) Both Greek and Aramaic were seriously challenging Hebrew not just as the vernacular, but for religious significance as well. The Aramaic and Greek translations of the Torah were very popular, and we find numerous permissions in Jewish law to pray in other languages. An example of just how far this trend had progressed can be found in the following midrash (Sifrei Devarim 343):

"ויאמר, ה' מסיני בא" (דברים לג, ב) - כשנגלה הקדוש ברוך הוא ליתן תורה לישראל, לא בלשון אחד נגלה, אלא בארבעה לשונות:
"ויאמר, ה' מסיני בא" - זה לשון עברי.
"וזרח משעיר למו" - זה לשון רומי [=לטינית].
"הופיע מהר פארן" - זה לשון ערבי.
"ואתה מרבבות קדש" - זה לשון ארמי.

"The Lord came from Sinai; He shone upon them from Seir; He appeared from Mount Paran; and came from Rivevot Kodesh" (Devarim 33:2)
When the Holy One gave the Torah to Israel, he didn't reveal himself in one language, but in four:
"The Lord came from Sinai" - this is Hebrew.
"He shone upon them from Seir" - this is Roman (Seir is Edom, identified with Rome. This is likely Latin, although some say that it refers to Greek.)
"He appeared from Mount Paran" - this is Arabic (Yishmael lived in Paran, from whom the Arabs are descended)
"And came from Rivevot Kodesh" - this is Aramaic (the word for came, ata, is Aramaic)

It was against this background that R' Simon needed to point out that the Torah was given in Hebrew. I'm sure that most Jews of the time knew that Moshe didn't speak Aramaic or Greek. But the message here is that word play can really only be appreciated in the original language. Something is always lost in translation. Puns, despite them being the "lowest form of humor", are the inside jokes of language, allowing a real connection between writer and reader.

I grew up in a family where we constantly made puns - some of them real groaners. And I still appreciate them today - you've seen me quote the comic strip "Pearls Before Swine". So as hard as it is for me to give up the first quoted sentence by a human as an etymology, I'm even more thrilled to see it was a form of a pun...

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chanukah

It's widely known that there is major disagreement as to the proper spelling of חנוכה in English. Andy Carvin has an interesting article about the different spellings and how Wikipedia has made Hanukkah more popular than Chanukah. And of course Wikipedia deals with the spelling issue in the main article and in the discussion page as well.

A book I picked up a number of years ago - How Do You Spell Chanukah?: A General-Purpose Romanization of Hebrew for Speakers of English by Werner Weinberg recommends Chanukah. Rabbi Josh Waxman in Parshablog suggests Chanukka. I'm partial to Chanuka or even Hanuka, but my wife quotes her fourth grade teacher as saying "The one rule about spelling חנוכה - it must have eight letters." And since shalom bayit (lighting Shabbat candles) comes before the mitzva of publicizing the miracle (lighting חנוכה candles) - see the last Rambam in Sefer Zmanim - I'll stick with Chanukah.

What I didn't realize is just how complicated the etymology of Chanukah is. The complication arises from the multiple meanings of the root חנך. While I am aware that חנך in modern Hebrew can mean "to educate" - as in chinuch חינוך , I always thought that חנך for chanukah meant "dedication". However, this article by Prof. Stefan Reif shows how the basic meaning of the root חנך is "to begin, initiate". Dedicate, on the other hand means "to consecrate to sacred uses" - קדש in Hebrew. He writes that this translation was based on the Latin translation of the Bible - the Vulgate.

One of Reif's proofs is Devarim 20:5, where it says:

מִי-הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר בָּנָה בַיִת-חָדָשׁ וְלֹא חֲנָכוֹ

While the JPS translates it as "Is there anyone who has built a new house but has not dedicated it?", Reif would translate it (as does Tigay in his JPS commentary, based on Reif) as "initiated it" or "started to live in it". Reif quotes an earlier article by Oliver Rankin as saying it means "not removing from the realm of the profane ... to that of the sacred, but the putting to common use." He also points out that no dedication of a private house is found in the Bible or "subsequent Jewish custom" and that "house dedication" is a modern Jewish custom.

He writes that the places where the verb חנך is used in regards to the Mishkan or Beit HaMikdash (Bamidbar 7:10, Divrei HaYamim II 7:5-9) a good translation would be "initation" or "starting upon their course of beneficial service". If "dedication" was intended, the verb should have been קדש or משח.

According to Reif, the reading of חנך as "to train, instruct" comes from a mistranslation of Mishlei 22:6 - חֲנֹךְ לַנַּעַר, עַל-פִּי דַרְכּוֹ

While the JPS has "Train a lad in the way he ought to go", Reif prefers "Start a boy on the right road."

A number of Rishonim support Reif's approach. Rashi on Bereshit 14:14 writes that "the word חנך signifies introducing a person or a thing, for the first time, to some particular occupation in which it is intended that he should remain". Radak in Sefer HaShorashim follows the same approach.

He concludes with the following:

the later development of the noun חינוך chinuch in the sense of "education" also demonstrates that the rendering "dedication" is inimical to the essential meaning of the stem.

This all seems very convincing. However, Reif does not discuss a very important aspect to the etymology of חנך. Klein writes in that entry:

Denominated from chekh חך ( = palate) and originally meaning 'to rub the palate of a child with chewed dates'. compare Arabic hanak (= palate), hence hannaka (= he rubbed the palate of a child), hanaka ( = he taught, instructed).

So according to Klein, the development is palate -> rubbing the palate -> instruction. It is unclear how we get from there to "dedicate" (as Klein has it) or "initiate" (as Kaddari writes). As Reif wrote, the connection between "education" to "initiation" is stronger than that of "education" to "dedication", but in light of the linguistic evidence, perhaps the order needs to be reversed (i.e. education -> initiation.)

I'm also not sure where the "rubbing dates on the palate" theory first shows up. Jastrow, in his entry for חניכה (surname) writes:

[rubbing the infant's palate with a chewed fig, v. Fl. to Levy Talm. Dict II 206] the name given to the child by the person rubbing his palate

Jastrow is referring to Fleischer's addenda to Levy's dictionary. Fleischer was an expert in Arabic - so it is likely that he based his assumptions on the connection between Hebrew and Arabic. But I haven't seen his entry (and I can't read German in any case) - so I don't know just how convincing it is.

I did find this quote from the Islamic Hadith:

A son was born to me and I brought him to the Prophet, peace and blessings of Allāh be on him, He named him Ibrāhīm, and he chewed a date and rubbed thereby his palate, and prayed for blessings for him and gave him back to me.

with the following note:

The Arabic word is hannaka-hū. The word tahnīk is derived from hanak which means the interior of the upper part of the inside of the mouth, or the palate. The new-born baby is made to taste either a chewed date as in this case, or honey, by some elderly member of the family.

Was this a Jewish custom going all the way back to Biblical times (as it would need to be to be the root of the verb חנך)? I can't say.

However, there is certainly a connection between chekh and chanikhayim חניכיים - gums. As we've seen many times before the nun has a tendency to drop out of Hebrew words, so חך originally must have been חנך.

One interesting point is that the word chanich חניך - which today means "pupil, apprentice, member of youth group" might not be related to the root חנך at all. It appears only once in the Bible, in Genesis 14:14:

וַיָּרֶק אֶת-חֲנִיכָיו

Kaddari, apparently following Albright, claims that it comes from an Egyptian word ha-na ku-u-ka meaning "armed retainers". Others claim that the Egyptian word was borrowed from the Semitic.

Two more articles discussing חנך and Chanukah:

From the Jewish Agency (I'm not sure who the author is - does anyone know?)

By Dr. Joseph Lowin

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sufganiya

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be writing posts about Chanukah related words. I have a bunch lined up - but if there are any words you're interested in, please let me know.

Last year, Rabbi Josh Waxman of Parshablog put up the following post on the etymology of sufganiyot סופגניה:

This is admittedly silly, and probably obvious to some, but what is the etymology of sufganiyot (jelly donuts eaten on Chanukka)?

The answer: from sponge, in that it is something which absorbs (oil, I guess). We see this root spg in Hebrew, and in the gemara - one of the more famous examples is sofeg et ha'arbaim, which means that he is lashed 40 (=39) times, that is, he absorbs the 40.

About sponge: According to the American Heritage Dictionary (cited at dictionary.com), the etymology is:
[Middle English, from Old English, from Latin spongia, from Greek spongia, from spongos.]

According to Easton's 1987 Bible dictionary (also cited at dictionary.com), the word
"occurs only in the narrative of the crucifixion (Matt. 27:48; Mark 15:36; John 19:29). It is ranked as a zoophyte. It is found attached to rocks at the bottom of the sea."

What about that n? Shouldn't it be spoge if it is the same root as sofeg? Well, in Greek, doubled gamma is pronounced ng. My favorite example of this is the word angel which is spelled gamma gamma rather than nu gamma.

Josh really covered it, but I have a few points to add:

a) Besides "sponge", spongos (or sphongos) is related to the English words fungus, spunk and punk.

b) Jastrow writes (in his entry for ספוג ) that spoggos "seems to be of Semitic origin", but this site claims that:

The Indo-European root for the fungus-spunk-punk-sphongos-sponge group of words is *panx, a root so very old that it is shared with Uralic, the otherwise unrelated language family of northern Eurasia. Since all the regular sound changes have occurred in both sets of daughter dialects, it is impossible to ascertain whether the loan word was from the Uralic to Indo-European, or vice versa.

c) While the double gamma (digamma) is also attested to here and here, I wonder if the Hebrew ספג wouldn't have been influenced by the tendency of Hebrew to "drop nuns".

d) Perhaps the precursor of the sufganiya was the sufgan סופגן - as found in the Mishna (Hallah 1:4) - also some kind of sponge cake.

e) And of course we can't forget the sufganiya's cousin: sponja ספונג'ה - washing the floor. This entered Hebrew via Ladino - espongar (to clean) with an esponja (a sponge.)

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hodu

Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I've been writing about fish all week! Let's talk turkey.

The Hebrew word for turkey is tarnegol hodu תרנגול הודו - often shortened to hodu הודו. Hodu is the Biblical word for India, and therefore tarnegol hodu means "Indian chicken". This is the name for the bird in many European languages - Russian indiuk, Polish indyk, French dinde and Yiddish indik. Even in Turkey they call the bird hindi. Of course, the bird originated in North America; so why the association with Turkey or India?

The English name "turkey" comes from an incorrect identification of the bird with an African guinea-fowl, which entered Europe through Turkey. The connection to India was due to another misunderstanding - as is well known, the first Europeans who reached the Western Hemisphere thought they were in India (hence the name Indians for the native peoples.)

As I mentioned earlier, Hodu is the Biblical name for India, appearing once, in the first verse of Esther. The name derives from the Persian word Hindu, but as often happens, the nun dropped out in Hebrew. The area called Hodu actually refers to the regions near the Indus river (actually in today's Pakistan, not India), from where it gets its name. The river and the region are known in Sanskrit as Sind, but the Persian "h" is cognate with the Sanskrit "s".

An interesting coincidence is that we eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and a common biblical Hebrew term for "Give thanks!" is hodu. We see that phrase often in Tehilim (Psalms), and a related verse in Divrei HaYamim I (16:8) starts the Pesukei D'Zimra section of the morning prayers (for Nusach Sefard and Edot HaMizrach). Because of this, people will often mark the schedule by the start of "hodu".

Uri Orbach quotes a saying of religious soldiers:
שש בבוקר הודו באוויר
6 AM and hodu's in the air
meaning they will start their prayers exactly on time.

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nun

The 14th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is nun. As we once saw earlier, David Sacks discusses in Letter Perfect the history of the letter N, and by association, nun:

Two letters could hardly be closer than N and M, fraternal twins in shape, name, sound and positioning...

Most of N's life has been lived in relation to M ... the 13th letter of the Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. was the wavy-lined mem, ancestor of our M. The name mem meant "water". The Phoenicians' 14th letter was their N, called nun, meaning "fish". Yet the shape of nun was a serpentine undulation, not at all suggesting a fish, aside from an eel.

Modern scholarship has determined that N was invented (by Semitic soldiers or laborers in Egypt) through copying of an Egyptian hieroglyphic picture of a snake. The shape of the Semitic N looked like a snake. The attested letter name "fish" therefore becomes problematic.

In ancient Semitic language, one word for snake was nahash, which began with the sound "n". By the rules of ancient Semitic letter names, this would have been a perfect name for a snaky-looking letter that took the "n" sound. So why didn't the early alphabet users just call their wiggly N letter by the name "snake"?

The answer may be: They did. They did perhaps call the letter nahash at the start, around 2000 or 1900 B.C., but later the name got changed - for the sake of M. Perhaps, in the centuries after 1900 B.C., a need was felt to bring the letters M ("water") and N ("snake") more into line with each other, on account of their unique nasal factor. The two letters had been placed together in sequence at the alphabet's invention; now they would develop even closer associations. In these centuries, the N letter grew more to look like the M letter. And if N's name had been "snake" (as is theorized), then it now changed to "fish", to better fit mem's "water". The purpose of such associations would have been to supply a memory aid for Semitic children learning the alphabet: In the letters' sequence, "fish" would follow "water", the two letters looking and sounding rather similar.

Steinberg points out that in the ancient Ethiopian alphabet Ge'ez the word for the N sound is nahas נחס , which is related to the Hebrew nahash נחש .

Klein writes that the word nun נון meaning "fish" derives from the root נין meaning "to sprout, increase". From the same root we get the word nin נין - which in Modern Hebrew means "great-grandchild". However, in the Tanach, it almost always appears before the word neched נכד - grandchild, as in Bereshit 21:23 וּלְנִינִי וּלְנֶכְדִּי . Therefore, it would appear that this a descendant "before" a grandchild, and in fact, Onkelos translates nin there as "son".

However, there is another root - נון , which means "to waste away, degenerate." Nivun ניוון means "degeneration". Klein quotes Fleischer as claiming that this root derives from the letter name nun and literally means "to be come as lean as the final nun ן ".

As we have seen before, nun alternates with lamed and mem, and it also changes with resh (כנע and כרע ) and (בן and בר).

We have noted many times in the past that the letter nun has a tendency to assimilate or drop out of words (see here here here here and here) - and there should be at least one more this week.

As a suffix, nun can create three kinds of nouns: abstract nouns (בנה - בנין - building), agential nouns (למד -למדן - a learned man), and chemical elements (מים -מימן - hydrogen.)

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bint

Due to fierce battles taking place there, the news has been filled with reports from the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil (alternatively spelled Bint Jbail / Bint Jubayl / Bint Jubail). We have seen the etymology of the Arabic jabal, meaning mountain (and how it is connected with Hebrew gvul גבול). But what does bint mean?

Bint in Arabic means "daughter" (and woman in British slang). As we've seen earlier this week, Hebrew words have a tendency to drop the letter nun. The word for son in Hebrew is ben בן. So the word in Hebrew for daughter should have been bint בנת as well, but the nun dropped out, and we were left with bat בת. We still see traces of the "original" form in the plural - banot בנות. We see a similar phenomenon in Aramaic, where bar בר means son (as in "bar mitzvah") and ברת berat means daughter.

What about the expression b'vat achat בבת אחת - "simultaneously, all at once"? Klein explains that it derives from a different meaning of bat. A bat (often rendered "bath") also was a liquid measure equal to one ephah איפה. Therefore, the expression originally meant "with one measure".

(There is a silly joke told of someone who wants to electrocute his enemy. He goes to an electrician for help, who asks kama vat כמה וואט? (How many watts?). The guy replies b'vat achat בבת אחת...)

Lets pray for a speedy and full recovery for those soldiers injured in the fighting in Bint Jbeil, and condolences to those families who lost loved ones...

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af

In this weeks parasha (Devarim) we find that Moshe claims that God was angry at him:

גַּם-בִּי הִתְאַנַּף

What is the meaning of the root אנף? Here is another example of a "dropped nun" (more here, here and here). We are more familiar with the dropped form - af אף, meaning "nose" and "anger", I suppose due to heavy breathing during anger. (By the way, it is important to distinguish between אף - "nose" and עף - "fly". For years I thought that kadur-af -- volleyball -- was spelled כדור-אף, and couldn't understand why Israelis played it with their nose.)

Arabic has anf for nose, and in Aramaic, anaf אנף also means "face". Kutscher writes that in Lashon Chazal there are very few examples of af meaning "nose", and instead chotem חוטם was more popular. His explanation for the switch is a phenomenon where one word in Biblical Hebrew has two meanings (here both anger and nose), in Lashon Chazal, one of the meanings sticks (in this case "anger") and the other is replaced. (Another example of this is עץ and אילן - but I'll save that for a later post).

A derivative of אנף meaning "anger" is the bird anafa אנפה - "heron", which according to Klein originally meant "the quarrelsome bird".

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moten and matun

A friend of mine recently asked me if there was any connection between the following words:

1. מותן moten - hip, loin, waist
2. מתון matun - moderate
3. המתין himtin- he waited
4. מתנה matana- gift

First of all, we can safely say that #4 is not related to the first 3. The original form of the word of the word was מנתנה, but the nun dropped out (as we've seen here for example). The root of the word is therefore נתן - not connected to the other three.
As far as #2 and #3, everyone agrees they are related. Klein says the root מתן means "to slow down, act slowly". Matun means he was moderate, patient and himtin means he waited (a sign of patience.) From what I can see there is no difference between להמתין and לחכות - both mean wait, but לחכות is used in the Tanach, and להמתין appears first in Lashon Chazal. In fact, when the verb חכה appears in Iyov 32:4, the Targum translates, and Rashi explains it as being המתין.
So what about moten? Any relation to matun? Klein does not suggest a connection, but Steinberg does. Steinberg says that the root מתן means "was long, was stretched" (Jastrow does as well.) He says this is the source of motnayim מתניים (the word always appears in the plural in the Tanach.) He doesn't exactly explain the connection between "to stretch" and "waist, hips", but I bet many of us could look at our belts and begin to associate...
Steinberg goes further and connects this root with a number of other words beginning with the same two letters. The verb מתח is fairly easy to connect - it means "to spread out, to stretch".
He also connects them to the word matai מתי - which besides meaning "when?" also means "a length of time" (see Yirmiyahu 13:27). He gives a number of additional examples (Habbakuk 2:6, Tehillim 80:5) and says that it is an error to always explain there matai as being part of a question.
Another related word, according to Steinberg is mavet or mot מות - death. He explains the idea of a dead person "lying down, stretched out".
Lastly, he connects the word metim מתים - meaning people, as in ויהי מתיו מספר - (Devarim 33:6) - "and let not his men be few". However, he doesn't explain the connection, so I can't write it here...

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shnayim

The Hebrew word for two is shnayim (shnaim) שניים. The feminine form is shtayim (shtaim) שתיים, and just like with the switch between echad and achat, we need to explain this one as well.

I have seen two explanations as to how the gender transformation developed. According to Steinberg in his Milon HaTanach, the original form was shintayim שנתים, but as we've seen before, the nun has a tendency to drop out of the middle of words.

Klein, however, writes that:

According to the opinion of several scholars, שתים is the abbreviation of אשתים. If it were really so the 'daghesh' in the ת of שתים would be accounted for. I am convinced that שתים is really the shortened form of אשתים and owes its form to the masculine equivalent שנים. I am of the opinion that אשתים is nothing but the dual form of עשתי, אשתי (=one), related to Akka. ishten (=one). אשתים as the dual of אשתי, accordingly lit. means 'two ones' (i.e. 'one taken twice'). cp. מאתים (=two hundred), אלפים (=two thousand), etc.

I have to admit that I'm not sure I follow Klein's entry, and I believe there might be a typographical error. Is he convinced that shtayim comes from eshtayim or not? If not, then perhaps he does agree with Steinberg.

The "several scholars" that he quotes likely includes Ibn Janach. According to this site, back in the 11th century, Ibn Janach noticed that shtayim is the only word in Hebrew that has a dagesh kal after a shva nach. (For more information about these terms, look at the Wikipedia article on Hebrew vowels.) He therefore concluded that the original form of the word was eshtayim, but the alef dropped off with time. (See also the Radak on Shoftim 16:28). The author of this essay (unfortunately I don't know who it is), mentions two other terms where the alef dropped off an original term, and the shva nach remained in place:
אשמורה > שמורה
אתמול > תמול

Steinberg also noticed this anomaly, but explains that because people were accustomed to saying shintayim, the dagesh remained in place.

Klein claims that shnayim derives from שנה - "to repeat", which also means "to teach". From here we get the word mishna משנה , and from the Aramaic cognate תנא - the Tanaim תנאים (the teachers of the Mishna.)

The Hebrew word for second (1/60th of a minute) - shniya שניה - is a loan translation from the Latin pars minuta secunda (= second small part of an hour).

The homonymic root שנה meaning "to change" is not related. According to Horowitz's approach, we can see this because of the transformation from Hebrew to Aramaic. Where שנה meaning "to repeat" becomes תנא, the root meaning "to change" maintains the shin. According to Klein, the word for year, שנה shana, originally meant 'change; period of changing seasons'.

And lastly, the word for sleep, shena שינה, derives from an entirely different root - ישן.

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tenufa

Today is 7 Adar - the day that Moshe Rabeinu died. We don't know the location of his grave, and in that spirit, my story today will include a number of items whose precise location is hidden...

After discussing teruma last week, Parshat Tetzaveh includes the concept tenufa תנופה. (Shmot 29:24,26,27). The meaning of tenufa is debated - some say it means "raised up" (similar to teruma, and the Aramaic translation uses the same root), others say "waved".

The root נוף (or נפנף) as "wave" leads to the word for banner, according to Klein "that which is moved to and fro". Horowitz points out an interesting development here. In both English and Hebrew, when "N" is the second letter of a syllable, it is difficult to pronounce and often dropped. Therefore in English we say "illegal" and not "inlegal", "irreligious" and not "inreligious". In Hebrew the letter nun is known as a "weak letter", and falls out of many words - nofel נופל in the future becomes e'pol אפול. Horowitz gives a long list of words where the nun falls out (How the Hebrew Language Grew, pgs 32-38). One of the examples he gives is the word for banner. If the root is נוף, the noun should be manpa מנפה. But the nun fell away (our first hidden item), and we're left with the word מפה - mapa. Mapa can mean banner, and also map and tablecloth.

Horowitz points out that "because maps were painted on cloth, mappa in Latin came to mean map. In French the word became nappa, that gave rise to our word napkin." In English the word became napron, and one was called "a napron". But the N fell out again, and instead of calling it "a napron", we began to call it "an apron". (There are a number of cases like this: "an ewt" became "a newt", "an ickname" became "a nickname".)

The third hidden item isn't etymological, but just a funny story. I started researching this entry after coming home late last night from work. I tried looking for the root נוף in my Hebrew Concordance and couldn't find it. Over and over again I looked, and thought my failure was due to my exhaustion. Turned out that my book was missing the exact page of that root...

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