tav

The 22nd and last letter of the Hebrew alphabet is tav (or taw). The Hebrew word tav תו means "mark, sign" and this was the early shape of the letter as well. David Sacks writes:

The word taw meant "mark", probably as in an agricultural identifying sign, like a cattle brand or the dye mark that modern Near Eastern shepherds daub on their sheep.

In Modern Hebrew tav can mean a musical note or a computer character. From the word tav we get the verb תוה - "to make marks, sketch, outline" - and this is the origin of the phrase tvay hagader תוי הגדר - "the route of the fence."

We have already noted that tav can alternate with the letters dalet, tet and shin. Additionally, Klein points out that tav as a prefix creates nouns and in doing so interchanges often with the letter mem: תרבית / מרבית , תוצא / מוצא.

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shin and sin

Well, we're almost done with the alphabet. Today we'll deal with the second-to-last of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet - shin / sin. The name of the letter derives from the early shape - that of a tooth or teeth, as in the Hebrew word for tooth - shen שן (Steinberg adds that the sound is also made by using the teeth). According to Klein, the word shen derives from the root שנן - "to sharpen".

As you can see from the title of this post, this letter is more complicated than others. Sin or shin? Klein writes:

The letter ש marks two different sounds: sin and shin. Hebrew sin corresponds to Aramaic shin and samech, Syrian samech, Ugaritic sh, Arabic sh. ... compare Hebrew נשא, Biblical Aramaic נשא, Aramaic נסא ( = he lifted, took, carried), Ugar. nsh (to lift), Arabic nasha'a (= he rose, was high, grew up)...

There are exceptions to the rule according to which Arabic sh corresponds to Hebrew sin and vice versa. These exceptions are due mainly to assimilation, partly also to the circumstance that Hebrew sin sometimes stands for original samech (see שכך, שבר, שתם). In earlier Aramaic, and Biblical Aramaic sin is generally preserved, but many words that have sin in Biblical Hebrew are regularly spelled with samech in Medieval Hebrew.

Hebrew shin corresponds to Aramaic-Syrian shin, Ugaritic sh, Arab s ... compare Hebrew שלום, Aramaic-Syrian שלם, Ugaritic shlm, Arabic salam...

In many cases Hebrew shin corresponds to Aramaic-Syrian tav, Arabic th ... compare Hebrew שלוש, Aramaic-Syrian תלת, Arabic thalath...

So we see that there are two letters - sin and shin. Horowitz goes further, and divides shin into two different letters:

Two different sounds are represented by the Hebrew letter shin. One is originally and really shin; the other is a "th" sound that coalesced into shin in Hebrew. Scholars write this second sound ת.

He then gives a number of examples where shin becomes tav in Aramaic: שור / תור , פשר / פתר, שנים / תנים.

He then continues by saying (as we have seen with ayin and tzade) that because of the dual nature of shin, you cannot connect certain words even though they seem to have the same root:

• שמן (fat) and שמונה (eight)
• שער (reckon) and שער (gate)
• נשר (eagle) and נשר (drop or fall off)
• שאר (remainder) and שאר (kin)
• חרש (plow) and חרש (be silent)
• ישן (sleep) and ישן (old)
• שלח (send) and שולחן (table)

All of these, according to Horowitz, can be proved by examples where only one of the pair gets a tav in Aramaic (or Ugaritic).

Steinberg writes that there are some Hebrew words that have shin added as a suffix instead of tav:

• חרמש - from חרם
• חלמיש - from חלם
• עכביש - from עכב
  

In Greek there was no "sh" sound, so many proper names were translated with "s": Moshe / Moses, Shlomo / Solomon, Shmuel / Samuel.

The letter shin as a prefix (she-) means "that". The full word for "that" is asher אשר. Eliyahu Netanel here discusses which came first - she- or asher? He believes that she- came first, with an alef and resh added on later.

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resh

The 20th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is resh. It gets its name from the original shape of the letter - like a rosh ראש - head.

In addition to "head", rosh can also mean "chief, leader", "top, summit", "beginning" and "principal, capital". Some other word derived from rosh are rishon ראשון - "first", reshit ראשית - "beginning", and rashi ראשי - "chief, primary".

The Aramaic version of rosh is closer to our pronunciation of the letter - ריש resh. From here we get the word reisha רישא meaning "the first part (of a Mishna)".

In Arabic, ras as head is found in many place names such as Ras al-Khaimah ("top of the tent") and Ras Tanura ("head of the barbeque spit"). Rais is another Arabic derivation, meaning "president".

While there is some debate among scholars, one opinion as to the etymology of the word "race" meaning "tribe" is from our root, via Arabic. Klein writes in his CEDEL:

race, n., family tribe. -- MF. ( = F.), fr. earlier rasse, fr. It. razza, which together with Sp. raza, prob. derives fr. Arab. ra's , 'head, beginning, origin', which is rel. to Heb. rosh

As we have seen earlier, resh can interchange with lamed and nun. Steinberg adds that the similarity of the shapes of resh and dalet cause them to alternate as well - for example ראה (Devarim 14:13) and דאה (Vayikra 11:14).

Resh is occasionally added to three letter roots and words: שבט / שרביט , כסא / כרסא. In other cases, the resh is assimilated - כרכר becomes ככר.

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kuf

The 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is kuf, and there about as many ways to spell it in English (kuf / kof / kuph / koph / qof / qoph / qop / quph ) as there are suggestions for the original meaning:

• monkey
• eye of a needle (Klein)
  
• container
• knot
• circular motion
• revolving sun

While I always thought the letter came from kof קוף - monkey, that doesn't seem to be the case. The word kof is not originally Hebrew, and kofim weren't indigenous to the land:

These animals are mentioned in I Kings, x. 22, and the parallel passage in II Chron. ix. 21, as having been brought, with gold, silver, ivory, and peacocks, by ships of Tarshish from Ophir (compare II Chron. viii. 18). The Hebrew name kof is a loan-word from the Tamil kapi, from which indeed the Teutonic ape is also a loan with the loss of the guttural, so that the Hebrew and the English words are identical. In Egyptian the form gôfë occurs. The Indian origin of the name has been used to identify Ophir with Abhira at the mouth of the Indus (see Vinson, "Revue de Philologie," iii.). The Assyrians, however, were acquainted with Apes, which were brought to them as tribute. Apes are not now and almost certainly never were either indigenous to Palestine or acclimatized there.

As far as the other explanations, they seem to be connected to the Hebrew roots קוף and נקף - meaning "to go around", and the origins of such words as tekufa תקופה - "revolution, season", and hakafa הקפה - "encircling, surrounding".

As we've seen before, kuf can alternate with kaf, chet and gimel.

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tsade

The 18th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is tsade (or tzade). It is sometimes called tzaddik צדיק - this is due to the running together of tsade with the letter that follows it when reciting the alphabet - kuf.

Tsade got its name from the shape of a "fishing hook", trap or a lasso - related to the root צוד - meaning "to hunt, catch, capture". From this root we also get metzad מצד - "fortress", which Klein says originally meant "hunting place". The plural of metzad is mitzadot, but Klein writes that a back-formation was made from mitzadot to mitzada - from where we get the famous fortress Masada.

Klein does not connect צוד with ציד - which means "to feed, provide with provisions", but Kaddari seems to indicate there is a connection - a hunt (צוד ) searches for food (ציד). Neither of them make a connection to tzad צד - side (not related) - but Steinberg connects all three. He says a hunter or a trap surrounds the prey on all "sides", which (as Kaddari wrote) becomes the food.

Horowitz calls tsade the "triplet letter" - for it originally had three pronunciations - one related to tet, one with ayin (both those letters interchange with tsade) and one that sounds like the current tsade. He provides a number of examples.

In Hebrew there are two Phoenician towns called צור tzur and צידון tzidon. But in the Greek translation (which occurred when the differences between the tsade pronunciations were evident) the towns are called Tyre and Sidon.

Based on this, he feels there is no connection between three meanings of the root צור - "bind", "to treat as an enemy", and "rock". We saw more of Horowitz's theory when we discussed the word tzvi.

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peh

(You may have noticed the layout of this site has changed a bit. For a while I've been trying to figure out a way to make it more readable, and easier to find previous posts. Now that I've switched to the new version of Blogger, I think there's a big improvement. In addition to a different layout, note the expandable monthly archives link, and the new categories section. I'll try to give a "category" to every common type of posting to make it easier to see all of them together. If you have any questions or problems with the new layout, please let me know.)

Peh is the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The name derives from the word peh פה - "mouth", and this was the original shape of the letter. As we've seen earlier, peh can alternate with bet, vav and mem.

Besides "mouth", peh can also mean "speech", "opening" and "portion" (as in pi shnayim פי שניים - "double".)

Similar to the word yad (hand), peh makes up a number of prepositions:

• כפי - like, as
• לפי - according to
• על פי - in accordance with
• אף על פי - although
  

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ayin

The sixteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is ayin. The word literally means "eye" and is so called due to the original form of the letter. This letter was borrowed by Greek for their vowels omicron and omega, and became the letter O in Latin (Sacks suggests that there may be a connection between the shape of the letter and the shape of a speaker's mouth when saying "o"). However, ayin is a guttural consonant in Hebrew.

Horowitz writes that ayin "is a twin letter":

Ancient Hebrew had two different ayin sounds. These sounds were represented in our alphabet by the letter ayin. One was a harsh, heavy ayin. This is now lost, and no longer used in Hebrew. The other was a soft, mild ayin. When the Greek Jews translated the Bible into Greek, they had to transliterate Hebrew names having the harsh ayin in it. They used the Greek letter gamma for it - so you can imagine how hard a sound it must have been.

This "ayin gayin" has even come all the way down to English. The Hebrew place names עמורה (amora) and עזה (aza) both of which have this strong ayin were transliterated into Greek as Gommora and Gaza. Didn't the odd forms of these place names in English ever puzzle you?...

Incidentally, Arabic, a close sister language of Hebrew, still pronounces these two ayins differently, and what's more writes them differently.

He then goes on to list a number of pairs of words that would seem to be related based on the letters in their roots, but each originally was based on a different ayin:

עצב sad vs. עצב fashion, shape
עופר deer vs. עפר dust
עור be naked vs. עור be awake

Steinberg writes that there are different alternating letters for the soft and hard ayins. The softer ayin would switch with the other guttural letters: alef (תעב תאב), heh (no example provided) and chet (ענק חנק). The harder ayin switches with gimel (רעש רגש), kaf (עטר כתר) and kuf (ערא קרה). Kuf (as we will see later) can sometimes switch with tzade, so we sometimes have the jump from ayin to tzade as well: רבע רבק רבץ , עוק צוק, ארעא ארקא ארץ.

Klein adds that in some cases, the ayin will fall out of a word, as in רות which may derive from רעות.

From the word ayin (the English word eye has an unrelated etymology) we get ein עין and maayan מעין - meaning "spring, fountain", and according to Klein and others this is a shorter version of עין המים - "eye of the water".

Klein says that the word maon מעון - residence is related to ein, but I don't exactly understand how.

From ayin we get the verbs עין - "to look carefully at", and also "to look askance at" - from which derives the adjective oyen עוין - "hostile".

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samech

The fifteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is samech (or samekh). There is some debate as to the origin of the name. Klein says it comes from the word סמך and means "support, fulcrum". E-hebrew suggests "spine" from the same Hebrew root, David Sacks suggests "pillar", while others say that root meant "peg, spike". Another theory is that the letter is similar to the shape of a fish, and therefore it is related to the Arabic samak, meaning "fish" (the Hebrew word for trout שמך - shemech - is related to this Arabic word.)

Another confusing aspect of samech is which Greek and Latin letters came from it. Sacks writes that for the letter sigma the Greeks took the sound of "s" from samech and the Greek styling of the name, but the shape and placement of the letter in the alphabet (#21) was borrowed from shin. From sigma, we get the Latin letter "S". On the other hand, some theories claim that the Greek letter chi, which led to the Latin letter "X" came from the shape of the Hebrew samech. As the shape of the letters evolved in each alphabet, we have the Hebrew version currently looking like a circle, and the Latin version as X. Kind of like tic-tac-toe, no?

The verb סמך has a number of meanings: "to support, sustain, uphold", "to lay (hands on), lean", "to draw near, approach". From the sense of "lay hands on" we get the concept of semicha - סמיכה - Rabbinic ordination, derived from the method of transfer of authority.

The Hebrew word for blanket - שמיכה - semicha, also derives from the root סמך meaning "to support". It appears once in the Tanach - Shoftim 4:18. The commentaries disagree as to the meaning there - some say it was a kind of blanket, others an article of clothing. Stahl says that it might have been so called because the garment was thick, and therefore is related to the Hebrew word for "dense, thick" - סמיך samich. This also goes back to סמך - something dense is pressed on, drawn close together.

Samech alternates with sin, particularly in Aramaic (כנס כנש), as well as with zayin and tzade ( אסר אזר אצר ). Steinberg claims it can also change with tav - as in תמך סמך .

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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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mem

The 13th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is mem. The shape of the letter represents the waves of water, and the name is directly related to the word for water מים - mayim.

There is some debate as to whether or not the word mayim should be viewed as a plural. Steinberg writes that the singular form is mai מי - although the word never appears in that form. There are two forms in the construct state (smichut) - mei מי or meimei מימי . Ibn Ezra, as quoted here, says that mayim is a dual form plural. In post-biblical Hebrew we find the plural of mayim - meimot מימות.

The letter mem alternates with other labials - bet, nun and peh.

Klein writes that mem works as a substantive prefix - it creates nouns or noun equivalents. It can create nouns - מדע from דע (knowledge), places מאבוס from אבס (storehouse), and instruments מגן from גנן (shield). Mem is also added to piel verbs in the present tense (e.g. מדבר midaber - speak). This can lead to confusion about the proper pronunciation of some more modern words. For example Almagor-Ramon writes, although it is an instrument, the correct pronunciation of refrigerator מקרר in Hebrew is mikarer, not makrer, for the Academy of the Hebrew Language gave it the name based on the action it does. On the other hand, the proper pronunciation of computer מחשב is machshev, not michashev, for the formation of its name is due to it being an instrument.

Steinberg goes one step further. As we have seen before, he often writes that many of Hebrew's three letter roots are based on two letter roots. He claims that it is very common for the two letter roots to have a mem added either at the beginning or the end to create a three letter root. For example, we have seen earlier the theory that matar מטר derives from טר . For an example of mem coming after a two letter root, he brings the case of Noach, whose name is explained in Bereshit 5:29 -

וַיִּקְרָא אֶת-שְׁמוֹ נֹחַ, לֵאמֹר: זֶה יְנַחֲמֵנוּ

The name Noach נח is connected to the three letter root נחם .

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lamed

No, this isn't a post about the interesting blog LAMED, but about Hebrew's 12th letter. The letter lamed originally referred to an ox-goad or taming whip - see the noun malmad מלמד in Shoftim 3:31. However, the more familiar root is למד - meaning to learn or to teach. Klein writes that lamed got that association from being the "rod of the teacher", and the verb meant "to prick, sting, incite, goad".

Kaddari provides a long note with various theories as to the etymology of למד. Some say it comes from "to accustom an animal to carry a load"; other have "to connect, to bind".

Lamed alternates with resh ( שלשלת and שרשרת ) and nun ( לחץ and נחץ ). Additionally, as Jastrow writes "lamed as first radical letter often rejected in inflection" - the root לקח becomes קח . On the other hand, as Klein notes, "the lamed sometimes appears at the end of nouns as an additional consonant, as in גבעל ( = stalk, stem), כרמל ( = garden land.)"

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kaf

The 11th letter in the Hebrew alphabet is kaf (or kaph): כ

The letter gets its name due to its similarity to the shape of the palm of a hand: כף היד kaf hayad. Besides meaning "hand, palm of the hand", kaf can also mean "sole of the foot", "pan, censer", branch (of a palm tree - כפות תמרים kapot tamarim, the Torah's name for lulav), handle, scale, spoon. The word kfafa כפפה - glove, kapit -כפית - teaspoon, and kafkaf כפכף - "wooden shoe, clog", all come from kaf. According to Klein, "all of these words derive from base כפף and literally mean 'that which is bent'".

From כפף - "to bend, be bent" and the related verb כפה -"to force, compel" we get a number of words:

• kfifa - כפיפה - wicker basket, perhaps called so because of a bent shape. When two people can't work together, it is said they can't live בכפיפה אחת - "in the same basket".
  
• kfia - כפיה - compulsion. A big issue in Israeli politics is always kfia datit כפיה דתית - "religious coercion."
• kippah כיפה - originally meaning "arch, vault, dome" and later "cap, skullcap"

However, the Arabic headdress keffiyeh gets its name from the town of Kufa, Iraq, where it was originally manufactured.

Kaf alternates with kof (qof) and gimmel - as can be seen by Stahl, Klein and others who say that כף is related to קב and גב - all having meanings related to "bend".

An interesting etymological side note: kaf means both the "palm" of the hand and the branches of "palm" trees. In English, the two meanings of "palm" are related, but they derive from an earlier root meaning "spread out, flat", whereas the Hebrew kaf means "bent".

(A less interesting, non-etymological side note. After my post on uchmanit, I have received a number of hits that seem to come from people looking for information about Blackberry devices in Hebrew. Am I going to get similar ones for people looking for information about Palm Pilot handhelds in Hebrew?)

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yod

The tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is yod (or yud or yodh). The origin of the letter's name is clear - it looks like a yad יד - arm or hand (see here and here.) It is the smallest of the Hebrew letters, and due to its size the Greek version of the name - iota - came to mean "a very small amount" and from iota came the word jot, which later meant "to make a short note of."

Yad is a very common word in the Tanach - Even Shoshan gives 1617 listings. So it is a bit beyond the scope of this post to deal with every nuance of the word. Besides hand or arm, it can also mean: handle, stem (of a fruit), monument / place, power / strength, part / portion, side, pointer (some Biblical examples here.) It is part of a large number of prepositions in Hebrew:

• ביד - by, through
• כיד - according to the power of
• ליד - near
• מיד - immediately
• לידי - to
• מידי - from
• על יד - next to
• על ידי - through

There is also a verb derived from yad - ידה - meaning "to throw, hurl, cast". Throwing of stones is יידוי אבנים - yidui avanim. The commentary Haketav Vehakabbalah on Vayikra 5:5 says that the verb והתוודה - "he will confess" derives from ידה - he throws away the sin. In this sense, vidui וידוי (confession) is identical with tashlich תשליך - both mean "throwing away." (I was planning on talking about vidui closer to Yom Kippur, but we're in Elul, so it's close enough.)
But while Haketav Vehakabbalah tries to explain how vidui is different than hodaah הודאה - praise (which would seem to be from the same root), Steinberg connects all three meanings. First of all, he writes that vidui is identified with bowing, prostrating oneself, throwing oneself on the ground - as in Nechemia 9:3 - מִתְוַדִּים וּמִשְׁתַּחֲוִים and Ezra 10:1 - וּכְהִתְוַדֹּתוֹ, בֹּכֶה וּמִתְנַפֵּל.
He then goes on to write that the verb הודה - to give praise, thanks (and the root of todah תודה - "thank you") - was also connected with bowing. As a proof, he shows how the Targum translates Shmuel II 16:4 - הִשְׁתַּחֲוֵיתִי as מודינא. He writes that only once in the Tanach is הודה used towards a person - יְהוּדָה, אַתָּה יוֹדוּךָ אַחֶיךָ - "Yehuda, your brothers will praise you" (which is a play on words on the name Yehuda.) In all other places, the verb is used towards God, where bowing and prostration are very appropriate. This concept was carried forward in to the Amida prayer, where we bow when we say מודים אנחנו לך.
From the Daat Mikra on Yoel 4:3, it would seem that perhaps there is a connection between ידה - to throw away - and נדה - the root of nidah נידה and nidui נידוי, both referring to a person cast away. But it's not entirely clear from that source, and the other sources I've checked are ambiguous at best. (For example, Klein says that נדה is related to Akkadian nadu ("to throw"), but doesn't connect it back to ידה.)
Lastly, just in case you were wondering, Philologos shows that yad is not connected to "yadda, yadda, yadda."

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tet

Unlike the other Hebrew letters, I have not been able to find a Hebrew word that the letter tet (or teth) is based on. I found some theories as to the shape it represents: wheel, spindle, urban town, basket. Klein's entry for טית says "name of the ninth letter of the Hebrew alphabet [of uncertain origin]".

(After preparing this post, I found that this site claims that Klein derives tet "from טוה (twh 794), spin, and renders teth to knot, knot together, to twist into each other, to interweave. The letter teth indeed looks like a little vortex or spiral." I don't know if the author has a different source for Klein, or perhaps is talking about a different person named Klein.)

Steinberg writes that טית (tet) in Arabic means a skin bottle, like a wineskin or a waterskin. I have not found that word mentioned in any other source, nor have I been able to find a Hebrew cognate.

Tet can switch with tav (תעה and טעה) and in the hitpael form of verbs whose root begins with tzade (הצטדק - not הצתדק). It can switch with dalet and zayin, as I've wrote about earlier. And it can also alternate with tzade (חטב and חצב).

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chet

The letter chet (also spelled het/ heth/ khet /kheth /cheth) is the eight letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There are two theories as to the etymology of the letter. One (as mentioned here and here) claims it is related to the Hebrew word chut חוט - meaning thread. The second theory (mentioned in the above sources, as well as cited by Sacks and Steinberg) is that the name of the letter derives from the word chayitz חיץ, meaning "fence, partition", and Steinberg writes that in Arabic and Syrian heth is the cognate of chayitz. This explanation seems to make more sense to me, particulary based on the shape of the letter, and can still be seen in the current Hebrew ח and the English letter H, which developed from chet.

The word chayitz derives from chutz חוץ - outside (also "except"), which also gives us the word chitzon חיצון - external.

We also find a root חצה - meaning "to divide". While I can't find a source that discusses it explicitly, I feel that חוץ and חצה are likely closely related - a fence (chayitz) divides (chotze) and leaves something outside (chutz). From the root חצה, we get such words as chetzi חצי - half and chatzot חצות - midnight. From the related root חצץ - also "to divide, to make a partition" comes the word mechitza מחיצה - partition.

As far as the etymology of חצה, Klein writes:

Phoen. and Moabite חצי (= half), Arab. hazwah (=fortune), OSArab חטי (= favor). These words show that base חצה is connected with {chetz} חץ ( = arrow). Accordingly, the original meaning of חצה probably was 'to divide by casting arrows or lots'.

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zayin

The seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet is zayin. The original shape is variously described as a sword, a weapon, an axe or here as a hoe.

The sense of "derives" from the Aramaic meaning of zayin זין as "arms". Klein says that meaning is probably borrowed from the Avestic zaena.

According to Klein the root זון - to feed - is not related. He claims it derives from the Akkadian zananu - "to feed". This is the root of the words mazon מזון - food and tezuna תזונה - nutrition. Steinberg, however, points out that there are many examples in Semitic languages where the same root refers to both war and food: זן, לחם, טרף , צידה (we've discussed the lechem connection here.) If we say that the letter zayin was originally a hoe, then we can see how a tool like that could be used (or reformed to use) as a tool of war.

There are a few other apparently unrelated words with the same root:

The root זין also can mean "to adorn, ornament". Klein writes that it is borrowed from the Arabic zana, zayyana, meaning "he adorned, decorated". The root זנה - "to be a harlot" is also not connected (more on that root here).

Zan זן meaning "sort, kind" is, according to Klein, borrowed from the Old Persian zana. There is debate about the word miznon (or maznon) מזנון - meaning cupboard, or cafeteria. Klein writes:

Most scholars - on the basis of Rav Hai Gaon's derivation - connect it with זן (= kind). Others suggest to see in it a loan word from Gk. mazonoios ( = a wooden trencher for serving barley). Greek mazonomos is compounded of maza (= barley meal) and nomos, from the stem nemaen (= to deal out, attribute).

The letter zayin alternates with tzade and samech: עלז/עלץ/עלס and with dalet and tet: זבח/דבח/טבח.

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vav

Good old vav. Vav ו is the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It derives from the Hebrew word vav וו, meaning hook or peg. The letter looks like the word (the letter in ancient script - and ancient hooks - looked more like a letter Y, or as Rashbam on Shmot 26:32 says, "a fork"), the word is made up of only that letter, and it's practically the only Biblical Hebrew word that begins with that letter. What a great package. Does everything have to be complicated?

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hey

When I was a young kid, maybe third grade, someone gave me The Aleph-Bet Story Book, by Deborah Pessin (JPS, 1946). It is a children's book with 22 chapters - each about one of the letters of the alphabet. All the letters take anthropomorphic forms and get their own story. Many of the letters are associated with the etymologies of their names: Gimel becomes friends with Gamal the camel, Dalet helps Adam invent the door, etc. Pessin has Hey invent the first window - for Hey "looked like a window". That always seemed strange to me - since hey does not look that much like a window to me.

Fast-forward to earlier this year. My father brought me Letter Perfect by David Sacks. Another book about letters in the alphabet; just as enjoyable, but without the cute stories. In his chapter about the letter E, Sacks describes how it developed from the Hebrew hey. He writes:

"What the he meant - and this is no kidding - was "Hey!" The letter's name indicated a shout of surprise. And the letter's shape illustrated it strikingly. The earliest surviving example of a written he appears oldest known alphabetic writing, carved into limestone in Central Egypt around 1800 BCE. The letter shape is a human stick figure, half crouching, perhaps leaping upward, arms raised at the elbows. The person is probably meant to be shouting, in an ancient Semitic expression that by coincidence resembles our "Hey!". "


You can see the development from the "hands-up" guy here to our current hey on the e-hebrew site.

There are those that say that hey actually refers to the Hebrew word הלל - hillul or hallel, meaning jubilation. I'm not so sure. While hey does start the word hallel, it isn't actually the make up of the word. In any case, I'm not sure we need to look so far. In Hebrew and Aramaic the words הא and הי (hey and ha) mean "behold". Klein says that הי, meaning "lo", "behold" or "here is" works as a prefix in the words הילך, היכן and הינו.

Interestingly, to return to Pessin, there are those that say that while the character originally meant hillul, it followed a similar transformation as we've seen in other letters, and later took on the meaning - and pronunciation - of "window". I don't think that this is referring to chalon חלון, since there isn't much of a similarity. Perhaps there was a Phoenician word hey meaning window. Anybody know?

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dalet

The fourth letter in the Hebrew alphabet is dalet (or daleth). There is some disagreement over the original meaning and shape of the letter. As we can see from here, the shape either represented a door or a fish. The connection to door seems clear - the Hebrew word for door is דלת - delet. But to some the original shape did not seem door-like, and looked more like a fish. Therefore some claim that the original name of the letter was dag דג (or digg in Phoenician) - meaning "fish".

Why did the letter change its name? David Sacks writes in Letter Perfect that this was possibly part of the switching of a number of letter names. He claims that around 1600 BCE, the letter became dalet when the "N" letter switched from nahash (snake) to nun (fish). This was to avoid the confusion of having two letters both with "fish" names. (The "N" letter became "nun", according to Sacks, to bring it in line with the letter mem, meaning water. This would be easier for children learning the alphabet - "water" followed by "fish."

Philologos discusses this issue further here, and has another column here where he explains why the letter was pronounced dalet or daled in Ashkenazic Hebrew/Yiddish, and not "dales" (more on that also here.)

What of the origin of the word delet? Kutscher writes that delet is one of the few words in Hebrew with a two consonant root - the tav is not radical (שורשי in Hebrew, derived from the Latin word radix, which means "root"). His proof of this is the the word for doors in Akkadian is dalati - and ati is a suffix for plurals. We also see in Hebrew that dal דל can mean door - עַל-דַּל שְׂפָתָי (Tehillim 141:3).

Klein, Stahl and Steinberg all connect delet to דל, and particularly to the two verbal roots: דלה and דלל. How are they all related?

At first דלה and דלל would seem to be opposites. The root דלל means "to be low" and also means "to become poor (דל), to decrease, to dwindle, to dilute (unrelated etymology), to thin out".

On the other hand דלה means "to raise up" - as in אֲרוֹמִמְךָ השם, כִּי דִלִּיתָנִי - "I extol (lit. lift up) you, O God, for you have raised me up" (Tehillim 30:2).

The seeming contradiction can be resolved by looking at the original context of the imagery. The verb דלה originally meant to draw up water from a well - the Hebrew word for bucket is dli דלי. In other words - what goes down must come up (or as I once heard someone say: "I'm afraid of low heights, not high heights. If I ever fall off something high, as I approach the bottom, I'll wish I was back up high again."

On this basis, both Steinberg and Jastrow say that the meaning of דל is "to be suspended, swing". This is its meaning in Aramaic: בגדך מדלי - "do you depend (suspend yourself) on good luck?" (Yerushalmi Shabbat 15d). Stahl says that דלה is related to תלה - also meaning "to hang, to suspend."

This is the connection to delet meaning "door". As Jeff A. Benner writes here:

The basic meaning of the letter is “door” but has several other meanings associated with it. It can mean “a back and forth movement” as one goes back and forth through the tent through the door. It can mean “dangle” as the tent door dangled down from a roof pole of the tent. It can also mean weak or poor as one who dangles the head down.

This can help us understand another meaning of the root. According to Klein, dala דלה - can mean "thrum" - warp threads hanging in the loom (See Yeshaya 38:12).

Kutscher writes that delet can also mean a page, as in Yirmiyahu 36:23. According to a theory here, delet originally meant a "doorboard" and then developed the meanings of a "board, plaque, plate, or tablet." This sense of the word entered into Greek as deltos, and is still preserved in the word deltiology - the study of postcards, where deltos means "writing tablet, letter." (The word delta, coming from Greek and meaning "a triangular alluvial deposit at the mouth of a river" doesn't derive from a Semitic meaning of the word, but from the triangular shape of the letter.)

The letter dalet alternates with zayin - (נדר and נזר) as well as tet and tav (בדל בטל בתל).

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gimmel

The third letter of the Hebrew alphabet is gimmel - גימל. The sound of gimmel - "G" is strongly related to the "K" sound. David Sacks writes in Letter Perfect, that:

No two letters of the alphabet are closer than C and G, fraternal twins in shape and sound. Settle your tongue and make the sound "k", which shoves air along the rear roof of your mouth (the velum, or soft palate). Leave your tongue in place, but this time start from your vocal cords: "g". Thus C (or K) is the unvoiced velar stop; G is the voiced velar stop. The kinship can be heard in the word "scorn," which would be pronounced much the same if spelled "sgorn." (Another example: On your next memo to your boss, try writing across the top "As we disgust.")

In Hebrew we see the same connection. Gimmel alternates with kaf and kuf (qof) -

• קובע, כובע, מגבעה (all kinds of hats)
• רגל and רכל
• סכר and סגר
• זגוגית and זכוכית
• and the pattern that we saw with קצ meaning cut, continues with גז as well: גזה, גזז, גזר, גזל, גזם, גזע

This also helps to explain why C became the third letter in English, instead of G. The Greeks converted gimmel into gamma, but the Etruscans who borrowed the writing from the Greeks, had no G sound. The nearest sound was "k" and so they turned gamma into "C". Later, the Romans needed a letter for the G sound, and created the letter "G".

We see another G/C connection in the origin of the letter gimmel as well. Gimmel is related to Hebrew gamal גמל - which became kamelos in Greek and later camel in English. There are scholars who believe that the shape of gimmel is not the "camel's neck", but refers to a hunter's "throwing stick". However, unlike some of the other letter changes (dag to delet, nahash to nun), I'm not familiar with a Hebrew word that relates to gaml as "throwing stick". But maybe a reader will be able to help us out.

The root גמל has three meanings. As mentioned it can refer to a camel - gamal. It can mean "to wean" or "to ripen" - גמילה in modern Hebrew refers to recovering from an addiction, and in this weeks parasha (Korach) we have the phrase (BaMidbar 17:23): וַיִּגְמֹל שְׁקֵדִים - "almonds were ripening". And the third meaning is "to pay, reward, recompense". From here we get the blessing "HaGomel" - הגומל לחייבים טובות - God rewards the guilty with favors. Also from this meaning comes the term gemilut chasadim גמילות חסדים - often translated as "acts of loving-kindness". (This reminds me of a joke I heard as a kid: "Q: What did the robbers say to the group of Habadniks? A: Gimme loot, chasidim!")

Klein does not find a connection between the meanings. The meanings for camel and payment have parallel words in other Semitic languages and do not derive from any earlier word. The meaning of "to ripen, to wean", according to Klein, is related to the root גמר - "to be complete".
Kaddari connects both verbs to the concept "to be complete". In Hebrew it makes more sense, and he writes that the root means: היה שלם, השלים, שילם - "was complete, completed, paid". Steinberg also connects גמל to שלם (and maybe influenced Kaddari, although I don't see any references to Steinberg in Kaddari's new dictionary), and connects the verb to "camel" as well. He says that one of the meanings of the verb גמל is "to put into actions one's plans (Yeshaya 3:9, Tehilim 137:8)." And therefore it is connected to the nature of the camel, who is always ready to serve.

Jastrow has a different theory. He says all the meanings of גמל are related "to tie, couple, load". So to pay is "to load (good or evil) on". And the camel is a "carrier of loads".

One last explanation comes from Rav Hirsch - he says a gamal is so called because it is as if it is weaned from water.

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