I recently found a post on a Hebrew blog that connected a few words that I had thought of writing about separately.
The blogger Ilan here writes about heichal היכל, adrichal אדריכל and tarnegol תרנגול. What do these words have in common? They all derive from the ancient language Sumerian and share a common root.
Let's take a look at each of the words.
Heichal appears numerous times in the Bible, where it refers to either a palace or the Temple. Klein gives the following etymology:
Probably a loan word from Akkadian ekallu ( = palace), whence also Phoenician הכל, Biblical Aramaic and Aramaic היכלא, Syriac היכלא, Mandaic היכלא, Ugaritic hkl ( = palace, temple). Arabic haykal ( = church) is probably an Aramaic loan word. Akkadian ekallu is probably a loan word from Sumerian e-gal ( = great house).
Adrichal in Modern Hebrew means "architect", and first appears in the Talmudic literature. However, it also appears there as ardichal ארדיכל, and most sources say that is the original form. The etymology of this form, according to Even-Shoshan is from the Akkadian erad-ekaly. This means "worker of the heichal" - and as we just noted, heichal is originally Sumerian. Ilan points out that originally the adrichal was the builder, not the architect. Erad here is related to the Akkadian word aradu - "to serve" and ardu - "slave". This appears to be cognate with the Hebrew root ירד - "to descend", and relates to the lower, subjugated status of the slave.
And lastly we have tarnegol - "rooster". Klein writes that the word is "borrowed from Akkadian tar lugallu" which is in turn borrowed from "Sumerian tar lugal (=bird of the king)." Lugal meant king in Sumerian, and it was made up of two parts - lu (man) and gal (great, as we saw in heichal).
In my post about pinkas, I showed an example of an Israeli notepad. If you noticed, the picture said "Kohinor". When I first came to Israel, those notepads were so common, that the name brand became almost generic, like Xerox or Kleenex (the term for this is apparently synecdoche).
I realize now that Kohinor is the product of Machberet Millenium of Holon. But they got the name from the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond of India. I was curious about the origin of the name, so I emailed my friend Mike Gerver, who is lucky to possess Ernest Klein's other dictionary, the CEDEL - Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Mike sent me the following entry:
Pers. koh-i-nur [with a long mark over the o and the u], lit. 'mountain of light', prop. a hybrid coined fr. Pers. koh, 'mountain', which is rel. to Pers. kohe, 'hump', OPers. kaofa-, 'mountain, hump', and fr. Arab. nur, 'light'.
It was clear to me that Arabic nur was related to the Hebrew נר ner - "candle". But I was curious - could the kaofa have a cognate in some Hebrew word. Over time Hebrew has borrowed words from Persian, so who knows?
Well, I didn't find any Persian related words in Hebrew, but Persian is one of the Indo-European languages, so I dug a little further. In Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English by Eric Partridge, he connects the English word "heap" to Sanskrit "kaofa", meaning "mountain (a great heap)". Partridge also says that "heap" is related to "hive", for which he gives the following etymology:
Hive comes, through ME hive, earlier hyve and huive, from OE hyf, akin to ON hufr, a ship's hull, Lith kuopa, a heap, L cupa, a tub or cask, Greek kupe, cavity, kupellon, a beaker, Skt kupas, cavity, pit, hollow, and kupika, a small jug; IE r, prob *keu-, extn *keup-, with basic sense 'a curving or an arching'
He then goes on to mention many words related to this root: coop, hip, cubit, incubate, concubine, succumb, cubicle, cube. The American Heritage Dictionary entry for this root adds church, excavate, cumulus.
There are some very interesting words there, but aside from some cases where Hebrew clearly borrowed from an Indo-European language, there wasn't much to write about.
Now before I go on, let me tell you something else about Mike. Besides our common interest in etymology, we both are very involved in genealogy. The two fields aren't all that different - they both deal with exploring roots, with a hope to get a better understanding of our past, and our present.
Long before I started my blog, Mike wrote an essay called "Distant Cousins", where he discusses "Hebrew and English Words with Common Origins". This is not Edenics (or its predecessor Adamics). Mike shows how some Hebrew words have IE origins (and are therefore related to English), some English words have Semitic origins (and therefore have Hebrew cognates), and some words aren't related at all (even when we might think they are).
The comparison to genealogy is obvious, if only from the title. And just as in genealogy you try to go back as far as possible, so does this essay. One of the theories he discusses there is that of the Nostratic Languages. This is something I haven't discussed on my blog until now, mostly because it doesn't have the level of certainty that I, as an amateur linguist, am comfortable with. The basic idea is that the Semitic languages and Indo-European languages may have a common ancestor for some roots.
One particular case where this seems to be the case may be our root *keu / *keup. Here's the entry in "Distant Cousins":
Cove and גבא
Nostratic root #87, gop‘a “hollow” or “empty,” has cognates in Indo-European geup, “hollow,” or “hole,” and in Afroasiatic gwb or gwp, “hollow,” or “empty.” An Altaic cognate is Mongolian gobi, “desert,” source of the place name Gobi Desert. Hebrew cognates to Afroasiatic gwb and gwp include גבא, “cistern,” גבה, “collect,” גוב, “dig,” גופה, “body,” גויה, “body,” and possibly קוה, “collect,” although that might belong instead with Nostratic root #190, see below. The Hebrew root גבה is the source of גובה, “collector of funds,” hence my family name Gerver (originally Goiva), as well as גבי, “gabbai,” גוב, “swarm of locusts,” and הגב, “locust,” since locusts come in large collections. גוב meaning “dig” is the root of גב, “cistern” or “trench,” as in the place name Ein Gev. גויה is possibly the source of גוי, “nation,” according to Klein, hence, via Yiddish, goy, “non-Jew.” קוה, “collect,” is the root of מקוה, “mikvah,” a collection of water.
Indo-European geup is the source of cove, via Anglo-Saxon, cubby via Dutch, and cobalt (from kobold, “house ruler,” then “household god,” then “underground goblin,” then an undesired metal found in iron ore and believed to have been put there by an underground goblin), via Middle High German. Watkins links this root with other Germanic roots beginning with ku (equivalent to geu in Indo-European), with meanings related to “hollow space or place, surrounding object, round object, or lump,” with numerous English derivatives.
If, as Watkins suggests, the “concave” words from this Indo-European root are related to other words with “convex” meanings, then perhaps the Nostratic root is related to Nostratic root #92, gupA (there are two dots above the u), meaning “bent” or “curved.” Although this root does not have any English derivatives from its Indo-European cognate gheub, “bent,” “curved,” or “crooked,” it has several Hebrew words which derive from its Afroasiatic cognate g(w)b, meaning “bent,” “curved,” or “bulging.” These include גבב, “heap up,” and its derivative גב, “back” (of the body), גבוה, “high,” גבן, “hunchback,” which is the root of גבינה, “cheese,” made by coagulating and contracting milk, גבעה, “hill,” גביע, “cup,” maybe גבול, “boundary,” because a boundary is curved, and maybe גבר, “strong,” if it originally meant “bulging.”
It is also tempting to connect these Nostratic roots with Nostratic root #243, the source of Indo-European keub or keup, meaning “bend,” “curved,” “round,” “arching,” or “hollow,” with many English derivatives, although that Nostratic root has no Afroasiatic cognate listed. The English derivatives listed by Watkins for Indo-European keub include cube, from Greek kybos, although Klein and Partridge both consider kybos to be a probable Semitic loan word.
I've written earlier about the connection between כף and גב - and just as there I see a strong case to connect the roots meaning "bent", I'm inclined to see a connection between the IE and Semitic roots having the same meaning.
About "cube", Mike writes:
Cube and כעבה
English cube comes, via French and Latin, from Greek kybos, which, according to Klein, is a Semitic loan word, cognate to Arabic ka‘aba, “square house,” which refers as a proper noun to the black stone which Muslims visit as part of their pilgrimage to Mecca, and Arabic ka‘ab, “cube.” Hebrew כעבה, referring to the stone in Mecca, is a loan word from Arabic, not a cognate to the Arabic word from proto-Semitic.
Let's return to the genealogy parallel. Often people will tell me "How can you not say that Hebrew word X and English word Y aren't related - they look so similar!" Well, in genealogy, I can't simply say I'm related to someone even if they look exactly like me. I need to go back to the roots, and even there, I need evidence. For example, in my research of my Paglin branch of the family from the town of Skaudville, Lithuania, I've found two families. Both have the same last name, come from the same town, and both are Levites. But even then I can't say they're related. Maybe for some external reason they took the same last name?
Same case here. Let's look at three words that many would guess are related: cave, cove and alcove. They look similar, and have similar meanings:
cave - A hollow or natural passage under or into the earth
cove - A recess or small valley in the side of a mountain.
alcove - A recess or partly enclosed extension connected to or forming part of a room
(the above definitions from www.answers.com)
Now let's look at the etymologies:
cave - c.1220, from O.Fr. cave "a cave," from L. cavea"hollow" (place), neut. plural of adj. cavus "hollow," from PIE base *keu- "a swelling, arch, cavity."
cove - O.E. cofa "small chamber, cell," from P.Gmc. *kubon.
As we saw above, Mike traces it back to *geup (as in Websters, quoted here), which may or may not be related to *keu.
alcove - this one actually has a Semitic origin. From "Distant Cousins":
Alcove and קבב
Alcove comes, via French, from Arabic al qubba, “the dome.” Arabic qubba is from the same Semitic root as Hebrew קבב, “to be bent, to be crooked, to hollow out, to vault.”
So they all might be related - but then again maybe not. And if they are - it's not nearly as close as it appears.
Let's give one more example. Another word associated with *keub is "hop":
Etymology:
ME hoppen < OE hoppian, akin to Ger hüpfen < IE *keub- < base *keu-, to bend, curve > hip, L cumbere, to lie: basic sense prob. “to bend forward”
And interestingly, "hop" may be the source of "hope":
O.E. hopian "wish, expect, look forward (to something)," of unknown origin, a general Low Ger. word (cf. O.Fris. hopia, M.L.G., M.Du. hopen; M.H.G. hoffen "to hope" was borrowed from Low Ger. Some suggest a connection with hop (v.) on the notion of "leaping in expectation.")
Take Our Word For It writes that "there has been a suggestion that it is related to hop and that it originally denoted `jumping to safety.' Reaching a place of safety gives one hope, the theory goes on to say."
And if we look above, we see that Mike mentioned that a connected Semitic root may be קוה - as in תקוה tikva - "hope"! Even the most devoted Edenics or Adamics wouldn't think to connect "hope" and "tikva". Which is why the real search for roots - in genealogy or etymology - can often be more rewarding and fascinating than playing a linguistic version of "Separated at Birth".
Except for one thing. Tikva and מקוה mikveh - the word Mike actually referred to above - aren't actually connected. And they're both plain old Biblical Hebrew. Mikveh (or mikva) meaning "a collection of water", derives from the root קוה meaning "to collect (water)." Klein writes that it may be connected to Syrian קבא - "was collected", and the volume unit kav קב, which in turn comes from קבב (= to hollow out). This root would certainly be connected to the sense of "bent" that we've seen so far.
On the other hand, tikva comes from a second, unrelated קוה meaning - "to wait for". It is related to קו kav - meaning "thread, string, line", and Klein says that the original meaning of the verb was "to twist, stretch", and from there to "be stretched, be strained" and finally to "await tensely".
Now of course there are famous midrashim that play on the two homonymous roots. But that doesn't mean they are related. So in etymology, just like genealogy, sometimes we suffer disappointment when we think we've made a connection. But in neither case does it pay to despair - "Hope springs eternal..."
In my previous post I discussed daftar דפתר, which means "notebook" in Modern Hebrew. A more common word is pinkas פנקס. Both words appear in Midrash Bereshit Rabba 1:
והאומן אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו אלא דפתראות ופנקסאות יש לו לדעת היאך הוא עושה חדרים
"the master builder does not follow his own opinion, but has difteraot and pinkasaot - plans and descriptions [Jastrow's translation] to know how to arrange the chambers"
While both terms mean notebooks of paper now, they had different meanings in the times of the Talmud. As we noted, a diftera was a leather hide used for writing. A pinkas, on the other hand, was a board or tablet, usually coated in wax, upon which the words were engraved.
The word pinkas derives from the Greek pinax - also meaning "writing tablet".
Kutscher, in this online article, explains the connection between pinkas and פינג'ן finjan - "coffee-pot":
But while these Arabic words – and there are scores of others in this category – took the main road into Hebrew, through the agency of its revivers as a spoken vernacular in Israel, others came in other ways – with Arabic speaking Jews, or during the War of Independence. Keif (“fun,” “a good time”) seems to be an example of the first, findjan (“cup”) of the second. In the days before the State this word, which in Arabic means “coffee-pot,” apparently entered the language through contacts between soldiers serving in the Palmach and Arabs. However, some people insist that findjan, too belongs to the former category. Incidentally, this word has a most interesting history. It derives from the Greek pinax meaning “notebook” and also dish. It passed into Mishnaic Hebrew in the form of pinkas (“notebook”) and into Aramaic as pinkha (“plate”). Southern Iraq, where Aramaic was spoken, mostly under Persian rule, for over a thousand years, from before the time of Alexander the Great until after its conquest by the Arabs in the middle of the seventh century CE. Not surprisingly, many Aramaic words were absorbed by Persian. In modern Persia (Iran) an original k in certain circumstances becomes g, hence the forms ping and also pingan. From Persian it passed over, together with other words, into Arabic in which there is no p but only f. in literary Arabic g became dj, and hence the form findjan, which, by this circuitous route, came back to Israeli Hebrew. The original Greek pinax, accordingly, has three offsprings in Hebrew – pinkas, pinkha (which is rare), and findjan reflecting vicissitudes in the Near East over the past two thousand years. We may add that thanks to the Turks, who borrowed innumerable words from Arabic before they embarked upon their campaigns of conquest into Europe, the word is common in European, and especially Slavonic, languages. I knew it as a child in Hungary, the country of my birth. I did not dream that it existed in ancient Jewish literature, or that I should find it , in a different guise, when I settled in Israel.
In his book Milim V'Toldoteihen, Kutscher writes that the Hungarian word was findzsa.
So while you might never have thought there was a connection between a pinax:
In my last post I wrote about the Hebrew word daf דף - meaning "page". A manufacturer of school notebooks in Israel is called daftar דפתר - could there be a connection?
There doesn't seem to be. While in Modern Hebrew daftar (or diftar) means notebook, this is a borrowing from Arabic, where it also means now "book of accounts" (see here how that sense entered Hindi.) Arabic in turn borrowed the word from the Greek dipthera, meaning "leather, hide" - particularly for writing.
Talmudic Hebrew also borrowed from the Greek, and we find there the word diftera דפתרא - with the same meaning as the Greek. For example in Megillah 19a, we find: דיפתרא דמליח וקמיח ולא עפיץ "diftera is a skin prepared with salt and flour, but not with gallnut".
coined 1857 in Fr. by physician Pierre Bretonneau from Gk. diphthera "hide, leather," of unknown origin; the disease so called for the tough membrane that forms in the throat.
An unexpected derivative of dipthera is the English word "letter". Also from the OED:
c.1150, "graphic symbol, written character," from O.Fr. lettre, from L. littera (also litera) "letter of the alphabet," of uncertain origin, perhaps from Gk. diphthera "tablet," with change of d- to l- as in lachrymose
This strange jump from Greek to Latin seems to have been aided by the mysterious Etruscans. This site explains:
Four words dealing with writing came into Latin by way of the Etruscan language, confirming the Etruscan transmission of the Greek alphabet to the Romans: elementum, whose earlier meaning was 'letter of the alphabet', litterae, 'writing' (originally derived from Greek diphthera, 'skin', a material on which people wrote); stylus, 'writing implement', and cera, 'wax' (for wax tablets on which to take notes).
I started by saying that the word was probably not related to daf. Klein says that the etymology is unknown, but is "possibly related to Greek dephein, despein ( = to soften)." YourDictionary.com and Partridge's Etymological Dictionary agree.
On the other hand, Steinsaltz writes that the word may have been borrowed earlier from the Persain dipir, "scribe", which has the same Sumerian origin as daf.
My wife and I were listening to the song Yachad by Gaya, which contains the line: ורק אם נאמין / ובלי שום דאווין
This site offers the following transliteration and translation:
Verak im na'amin, uvli shum da'awin
If we only believe, no mucking around
I think a better translation for the second half would be "with no showing off". I knew dahween meant "showing off" or "fuss", but I never knew why. Our best guess? Maybe it was a mispronunciation of (Charles) Darwin - was he a show-off? Or are those animals who choose to evolve considered pretentious?
But no. Dahween is actually a back-formation, in the singular,from the Arabic dawaween, which is really the plural of diwan. According to Rosenthal, the word diwan means "a fanciful story" (from here our slang term), but also a "book of poems" (such as the Diwan of Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi) and a "salon". That's quite a collection of definitions - what's the connection?
Well, if you haven't noticed yet, the word "divan" in English can also mean:
1. A long backless sofa, especially one set with pillows against a wall. 2. A counting room, tribunal, or public audience room in Muslim countries. 3. The seat used by an administrator when holding audience. 4. A government bureau or council chamber. 5. A coffeehouse or smoking room. 6. A book of poems, especially one written in Arabic or Persian by a single author.
1586, "Oriental council of state," from Turk. divan, from Arabic diwan, from Pers. devan "bundle of written sheets, small book, collection of poems" (as in the "Divan i-Hafiz"), related to debir "writer." Sense evolved through "book of accounts," to "office of accounts," "custom house," "council chamber," then to "long, cushioned seat," such as are found along the walls in Middle Eastern council chambers. (See couch.) The sofa/couch sense was taken into Eng. 1702; the "book of poems" sense in 1823.
French, from Turkish, from Persian divan, place of assembly, roster, probably from Old Iranian *dipivahanam, document house : Old Persian dipi-, writing, document (from Akkadian tuppu, tablet, letter, from Sumerian dub) + Old Persian vahanam, house
This would connect it to the Hebrew word daf דף - now meaning "page". Klein gives the following definition and etymology for daf:
1. (Post-Biblical Hebrew) board, plank. 2. (Post-Biblical Hebrew) column (in a scroll). 3. (New Hebrew) leaf, page. [Together with JAram-Syr. דפא (=board, plank), Arabic daff (=side), borrowed from Akkadian (a)dappu, duppu, wich is a loan word from Sumerian dub. Arabic daffah (=cover of a book), is possibly derived from Aramaic.]
He also writes that the Hebrew word dofen דופן - "wall, side" may be connected, as well as the Biblical word tafsar טפסר - "scribe":
A loan word from Akkadian dupsharru, from Sumerian dub-sar, literally meaning "tablet-writer", from dub (=table, tablet) and sar (=to write).
Returning to more recent times, the dish "Chicken Divan" is related as well. This site gives the history:
Chicken Divan was the signature dish of a 1950s New York restaurant, the Divan Parisienne. It is the word "divan" itself that is of interest. In English, divan came to mean sofa, from the council chamber's benches, while in France it meant a meeting place or great hall. It was this meaning that attracted the notice of the owners of the New York restaurant as they searched for a name that would simply continental elegance.
But we can continue past the 1950s, into something even more recent. The linguist Yoram Meltzer writes here that Arabic bloggers have started adopting the word maduna for blog, and maduni for blogger. Both of those words derive from the divan meaning "record of accounts". Certainly an appropriate word for a blog, and there is no shortage of dahween in most blogs as well...
After realizing that I was mistaken in my assumption that kvish כביש - "road" -was an ancient Hebrew word, I decided to write a post about rechov רחוב - "street". Surely that was a biblical word . I knew Haman paraded Mordechai וַיַּרְכִּיבֵהוּ, בִּרְחוֹב הָעִיר - "b'rchov ha'ir" (Ester 6:11) and Zecharia prophesied that old men and women would sit "b'rechovot yerushalayim" עֹד יֵשְׁבוּ זְקֵנִים וּזְקֵנוֹת, בִּרְחֹבוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָם (Zecharia 8:4).
But as you regular readers of this blog are not surprised to find out, I was mistaken again. While in Modern Hebrew rechov means street, in Biblical and Talmudic Hebrew it meant "a broad open place (in a city), square" (Klein). Only in Medieval Hebrew did it take on the meaning of "street". Today rechava רחבה continues the older meaning of rechov.
While I'm not sure why the term changed its meaning, I can perhaps guess that the teaming of drachim דרכים - "roads" with rechovot רחובות in the Mishna (Shekalim 1:1, Moed Katan 1:2), might have had some influence.
Rechov of course derives from רחב rachav - meaning - "wide". Ben Yehuda writes that this root is the source of a number of proper names of people and places: Rechavam רחבעם, Rechovot רחובות and Rechavia רחביה.
He goes on to say that in Aramaic, the root רוח (revach) was preferred, which has a similar sound and meaning to רחב - and perhaps are related etymologically as well.
However, I have to admit a mistake I made in the comments. I wrote that:
neither word is particularly "modern" Hebrew...
I just figured that kvish, "road", was so familiar and common that it couldn't be of modern coinage. But once again, my initial assumption was wrong.
Klein provides the following etymology:
paved road [Coined by the author and historian Zeev Jawitz 1848-1924, from כבש]
I don't know if there was any debate about the adoption of this word; Ben-Yehuda doesn't include it in his dictionary.**
From the root כבש - "to tread down, subdue, press" we get a number of words:
כיבוש - kibush: conquest, capture
כבוש - kavush: pickled
כבש - kevesh: ramp (in Divrei HaYamim II 9:18 it is more of a footstool)
כבשן - kivshan: furnace - Klein says it means "literally 'that which subdues' (metals)"
There is also an opinion that the slang phrase "put the kibosh on" comes from this root, via Yiddish; however othersdisagree.
A closely related root to כבש is כבס - "to wash clothes", since laundry was done by beating and wringing the clothes. Klein also points out that the roots כפש (to press down) and גבש (to consolidate) may be related.
Almagor-Ramon in Rega Shel Ivrit writes that it's important to pronounce the word for ramp as kevesh, and not keves - which means "lamb". And in fact, Ben-Yehuda, Klein and Kaddari make no connection between the two homographs.
However, Steinberg writes that sheep are known for their trampling, as in Yeshayahu 7:25 - וּלְמִרְמַס שֶׂה - "...and sheep shall tramp about". He goes on to write that "the authors of the dictionaries have strayed from the straight path in their explanation of this word" - i.e. they don't connect kevesh and keves.
I'm not sure exactly which dictionary that preceded him is the object of his criticism. Gesenius connects the two terms by saying that the lamb at that age is "fit for coupling" (i.e. to be subdued). The BDB hints to a connection by mentioning "battering-ram". And Jastrow connects them by saying that the lamb was "thick, strong" (which I guess is often a result of pressure.)
In any case, perhaps Steinberg would have some comfort from an entry in a more recent dictionary. Botterweck and Ringgren discuss this term in their Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (page 43):
Hebrew kebes is related to the common Semitic verb kbs, "overthrow", and kbs, "roll", derived from Akkadian kabasu, "tread (down)". The semantics of kabsu may be explained by the early use of sheep to tread seed into the ground or to tread out grain on the threshing floor; this etymology is supported by the Egyptian parallels sh and sht.
So while כבש might be a good solution for a game of Kri and Ktiv, I wouldn't be able to say with certainty that they aren't related...
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** Update: I now found that Ben Yehuda does mention כביש in his dictionary. He punctuates it as kavish (with a kamatz) and says that it is used in the press and in popular speech meaning "a paved road, made from gravel and earth pressed together." He says that an earlier source for this word is kvisha כבישה - as found in the Aruch's version of Mikvaot 8:1 - where it means a "side path" (according to Jastrow.)
Aside from some other distractions, I've been holding off on a post until I was ready to write about remez (remember PaRDeS?). But while it makes sense for me to finish researching that word before I write about it, there's no need for me to stop writing completely. So we'll get back to that series soon, I hope.
A neighbor asked me recently about the Hebrew word for date (as in a statement of time) - taarich תאריך. Was it connected to the root ארך - as in a "length" of time? That seemed logical to me, but I figured I should look it up. Turns out it was an incorrect assumption.
Klein gives the following etymology:
Transliteration of Arabic ta'rih ( = dating, date, time, era; chronicle, annals), infinitive of 'arraha (= he dated a letter, etc. fixed a certain time, wrote the history of something.)
However, since Klein's dictionary is in English, and he doesn't go back further about the origin or Hebrew cognates of arraha - it's too early to say if it is related to ארך.
So I looked in the Hebrew dictionaries. Here the pictures becomes more clear. Ben Yehuda, Even Shoshan and Stahl all say that the Hebrew spelling of the Arabic word ta'rih is תאריח (the chet has an apostrophe at the end - for some reason Blogger isn't letting me place it there.) This is the Arabic letter Ha - which is (sometimes) cognate with the Hebrew chet. (Kaph is a different letter in Arabic and Hebrew.)
arracha : fix a date [Sem y-r-ch, Akk warchu (moon), Heb yareach, tarich (date), JNA yarkha (month), Sab warch, Amh war (month), tarik (history), Tig werehh (moon), Uga yrch, Phoen yrch]
Here it is connected to the Hebrew word yareach ירח - "month". But as Horowitz writes, the words ארח and ירח are related:
The root ארח-ירח means "to wander".
The following easily relatable words come from it:
אורח (oreach)- a guest, one who wanders אורחה (orcha)- caravan, the caravan wandered אורח (orach)- a path or road that wanders along ירח (yareach) - the moon - preeminently the wanderer of the sky. The moon is constantly moving about th heavens and hence its name. ירח (yerach) - is a month. A month is simply the period of time it takes the moon to grow from a crescent, to attain fullness and then to wane. This takes approximately twenty-nine and a half days. ירחון (yarchon)- monthy magazine
Klein also adds the word for meal - ארוחה arucha. He writes that it probably originally meant "food for the journey".
This root also appears in the Arabic phrase "ruh min hon" - "Go away". Stahl connects these words to ruach רוח - "wind" and rea'ch ריח - "odor" - that wafts, travels in the air.
The only question remaining - and I don't have an answer - is why isn't the Hebrew word for date spelled תאריח? Ben-Yehuda and others quote the mathematician and philosopher Abraham bar Hiyya (1070-1136) as the earliest source for the word (in חשבון מהלכות הכוכבים -"Calculation of the Courses of the Stars"). He lived in Arabic Spain, but unlike his contemporaries, he wrote in Hebrew, not Arabic. He is credited with coining many scientific terms in Hebrew. It doesn't seem likely he would have mistaken a chet for a kaph - but who knows? Actually - maybe one of you?
The first initial in the acrostic PaRDeS is peshat (or pshat) - פשט. The definition of peshat is - "the plain, simple meaning". Of course, what defines the peshat of a text or a subject is debatable. Nechama Leibowitz is quoted here as saying: ""If I say it, it's peshat. If you say it, it's derash."
The word peshat comes from the root פשט, for which Klein gives a number of meanings: "to spread, to strip off; to make a dash, make a raid; to stretch out; to make plain, explain." The verb להתפשט therefore means "to undress". From this root we get the adjective pashut פשוט. Rut Almagor-Ramon explains here that pashut originally meant "straight" as in a shofar pashut שופר פשוט - a "straight shofar". She explains that only in the Middle Ages did the word take on its more popular meaning today - "simple".
The Arabic cognate to פשט is basat. From here we get two familiar expressions in Hebrew slang:
a) basta - A market stand. Stahl writes that the original meaning was produce "spread out" on display for purchase. We also have the expression sagar et habasta - סגר את הבאסטה, which literally means "to close the stand" but has the sense of "to end a continuous activity".
b) mabsut - satisfied, pleased. Stahl writes that when a person is happy his "heart expands". In English we also see a connection between relaxed and happy.
I'm trying to get back in to writing again. After spending several weeks indexing my sources, I thought I was ready to go. But it turned out that my home computer wasn't working well (talk about the shoemaker's child going barefoot!). So I was delayed again.
Well, I think I'm past those issues now - mostly I have to get into the routine of regular writing. Usually a good way for me to do that is to start a series of related posts. I came up with the idea of discussing the words in the mnemonic פרד"ס PaRDeS: פשט peshat, רמז remez, דרש derash, סוד sod. Of course it made sense to discuss the word pardes פרדס itself, and its connection to the English word "paradise".
So I checked my newly-created index, and lo and behold - everyone and his uncle has something to say about pardes and paradise. I'm not quite sure how to start, so I guess I'll just quote a source, and then add on additional sources that have something new.
Here's Klein's entry for pardes (the first definition is the biblical one):
1. park, orchard.
2. (Post Biblical Hebrew) esoteric philosophy
3. (New Hebrew) orange grove
From Avestic, of Old Persian origin. Compare Avestic pairidaeza (= enclosure), which is compounded of pairi (=around) and daeza (=wall). The first element is cognate with Greek peri (=around, about). The second element is cognate with Greek teichos ( = wall). Greek paradeisos (= park, the garden of Eden, paradise), whence the Latin paradisus, is also of Old Persian origin. Aramaic פרדס, פרדסא is borrowed from Hebrew.
c.1175, "Garden of Eden," from O.Fr. paradis, from L.L. paradisus, from Gk. paradeisos "park, paradise, Garden of Eden," from an Iranian source, cf. Avestan pairidaeza "enclosure, park" (Mod. Pers. and Arabic firdaus "garden, paradise"), compound of pairi- "around" + diz "to make, form (a wall)." The first element is cognate with Gk. peri- "around, about" (see peri-), the second is from PIE base *dheigh- "to form, build" (see dough). The Gk. word, originally used for an orchard or hunting park in Persia, was used in Septuagint to mean "Garden of Eden," and in New Testament translations of Luke xxiii.43 to mean "heaven" (a sense attested in Eng. from c.1205). Meaning "place like or compared to Paradise" is from c.1300.
The history of paradise is an extreme example of amelioration, the process by which a word comes to refer to something better than what it used to refer to. ... Zoroastrian religion encouraged maintaining arbors, orchards, and gardens, and even the kings of austere Sparta were edified by seeing the Great King of Persia planting and maintaining his own trees in his own garden. Xenophon, a Greek mercenary soldier who spent some time in the Persian army and later wrote histories, recorded the pairidaeza- surrounding the orchard as paradeisos, using it not to refer to the wall itself but to the huge parks that Persian nobles loved to build and hunt in. This Greek word was used in the Septuagint translation of Genesis to refer to the Garden of Eden, whence Old English eventually borrowed it around 1200.
The Encyclopedia Mikrait lists pardes as one of the Persian words that entered into Biblical Hebrew. It appears three times in the Tanach: Shir HaShirim 4:13, Kohelet 2:5, and Nechemiah 2:8. In these cases it has the general meaning of "orchard", compared to the specific sense in Greek of fenced off areas belonging to the king.
Kutscher points out that most of the Persian words that entered Hebrew at that time were related to governance, and therefore pardes probably originally was borrowed from the word referring to the parks or gardens of the king.
On the other hand, Ben Yehuda mentions that the word pardesu was borrowed from Persian to Late Babylonian (Kaddari also mentions Akkadian), and perhaps from here pardes entered Biblical Hebrew.
Then the Septuagint used paradeisos to translate both pardes and the more classic Hebrew word for garden, gan.
So if Xenophon lived from 431 - 355 BCE, the word had certainly entered Greek rather strongly, since it was used in the Greek translation of the Bible only a few centuries later, and not only for the similar sounding "pardes".
Steinberg's entry for pardes mentions that it was used to translate the word אשל (Bereshit 21:33) into Aramaic in the Targum Yerushalmi, as described in Sotah 10a. The meaning there is "an orchard with many types of fruits." Steinsaltz there writes that the word developed from specifically a pomegranate orchard (see Ibn Ezra on Kohelet 2:5, where he says that a gan has many types of trees, and a pardes has only one type), to an orchard of many types of trees (Vayikra Rabba 13), and finally an orchard where people would go to relax and play in. This last sense would seem to be the esoteric one that Klein mentioned above, as in the famous Talmudic statement "Four entered pardes" (Chagiga 14b.)
However, the Jewish Encylopedia has a slightly different understanding of pardes in that context:
The word pardes is used metaphorically for the veil surrounding the mystic philosophy (Hag. 14b), but not as a synonym for the Garden of Eden or paradise to identify a blissful heavenly abode for the righteous after death. The popular conception of paradise is expressed by the term "Gan 'Eden," in contradistinction to "Gehinnom" = "hell."
In any case, I stay far away from the Artscrollian theory mentioned here (although read the very interesting comments as well - no mention of Xenophon's early use however) that pardes was originally a Hebrew word...
Before I switched to a small Jewish day school, I attended a very large, fairly prestigious public high school. I've written elsewhere how it was at this school I stopped studying Japanese, and began studying Hebrew. That was certainly the benefit of a large school - they offered many foreign languages for study.
In addition to languages, there were also an impressive amount of "clubs". Students could participate in after-school groups ranging from "Pre-Med" to "Model Airplane" to "Bowling". Looking at the current list, it's interesting to see how interests have changed in the past 20 years. For example, when I went to school there, they had an "Israeli Culture Club". Today they have "Schmooze For Jews".
One of the clubs that I still remember reading about, but never really understood what it was about was "Agape". The yearbook entry states:
Agape in Greek, means unconditional love. Members share in this unconditional love at each meeting. During the course of the year, members sing, have group discussions and hear from different special speakers.
I only found out recently that agape (pronounced ah-GAH-peh) is a Christian term (and the club was indeed a Christian club). I just finished reading a fascinating book - highly recommended to readers of this site - Empires of the Word - A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Oster. On page 270, he writes in the footnote:
It has been suggested that the favourite choice of the Christian word for 'love', agape, is influenced by Hebrew aheb, 'love' (which happens to have much stronger sexual overtones than the Greek), and Greek skene, 'tent', by Hebrew seken, 'dwelling' (Moule 1959:186)
Greek words whose use, or at least frequency, may have been suggested by a certain (perhaps fortuitous) similarity of sound or spelling to certain Semitic words.
So while the use of the word agape may have been influenced by Hebrew, please don't make the mistake (that I did when I first read the footnote) of thinking that agape actually derives from the Hebrew אהב.
While agape is generally used in a Christian context, the word helps us understand a difficult Talmudic phrase (found on Menachot 44a). The columnist Philologos quotes (his uncle?) Rabbi Saul Lieberman:
There is a Talmudic legend about a pious Jew who, hearing of a famous courtesan in Italy who charged the astronomical sum of 400 gold coins to spend a night with her, could not control his curiosity and traveled to her with the money to find out what she charged so much for. Yet his religious inhibitions got the better of him and at the crucial moment he was impotent — which made the courtesan, no less curious herself, react by saying, “By the limb of Rome [gapa shel Romi, in Hebrew], I will not let you go until you tell me what is wrong with me.”
What is “the limb of Rome”? Lieberman convincingly shows that the Hebrew word gapa, “limb of,” is actually a later corruption by scribes who no longer understood Greek of the Greek word agape, “love,” and that in the original story, as told and understood by Jews in Palestine, the courtesan swore by “the love of Rome.”
It seems quite certain to me that גפה דרומי really means agape of Rome, but refers not to some obscure love of Rome, but to the famous goddess - Isis, who was called Agape.
Lieberman than shows how the one other Talmudic mention of גפא דרומא (Pesachim 87b) also likely refers to an oath to the goddess Isis.
So we have a Greek word that is used by Christians via Jewish influence, and was used by idolatrous Romans as quoted in the Jewish Talmud. How can you not love this - unconditionally?
In this week's parasha, Yosef gives to his brothers clothing - chalifot smalot - (Bereshit 45:22):
לְכֻלָּם נָתַן לָאִישׁ, חֲלִפוֹת שְׂמָלֹת
While in Modern Hebrew a chalifa is a suit of clothes, clearly there is a connection here to the root חלף meaning "to pass, to change", and particularly the hifil form of the verb - החליף - "to exchange, replace." We see this from the previous parasha (41:14), where Yosef has his clothes changed: וַיְחַלֵּף שִׂמְלֹתָיו. On this basis, the JPS translates chalifot smalot as "a change of clothing." This seems to capture the sense of the term better than Kaplan's "outfit of clothes." Therefore I'm not sure I understand Kil's note in Daat Mikra that "there is an opinion" (whose?) that chalifot and smalot are synonymous, but chalifot is Assyrian and smalot is Lashon Torah (Hebrew?).
Ibn Ezra suggest that the word chalifot means that each outfit was different than the other - which also explains why the word is in plural. Chizkuni says that the word means clothes that are changed occasionally. In any case, a connection between "change" and "clothes" is not unique to Hebrew. Klein points out Arabic badlah (=suit of clothes) and badala (=he exchanged). Kaddari mentions the Italian mutande, meaning "pants" which I'm sure is related to the Latin mutare, meaining "to change". If I'm not mistaken, the Latin phrase mutatis mutandis(literally "with those things having been changed which need to be changed") is used as a translation of the Hebrew phrase lehavdil להבדיל.
Another meaning of chalifa in the Bible is "replacement, successor". This is Kaddari's explanation of Melachim I 5:28:
וַיִּשְׁלָחֵם לְבָנוֹנָה, עֲשֶׂרֶת אֲלָפִים בַּחֹדֶשׁ חֲלִיפוֹת - "He sent them to Levanon in (alternating) shifts - chalifot - of 10,000 a month"
and Iyov 14:14:
כָּל-יְמֵי צְבָאִי אֲיַחֵל-- עַד-בּוֹא, חֲלִיפָתִי. - "All the time of my military service I wait / Until my replacement - chalifati - comes".
This sense of the word has entered Arabic as well. The Arabic word caliph - a leader of an Islamic state - is related to the Hebrew חלף, and has the following etymology:
1393, from Arabic khalifa "successor," originally Abu-Bakr, who succeeded Muhammad in the role of leader of the faithful after the prophet's death. Caliphate, "dominion of a caliph" is from 1614.
But if you read the title of this post, you may be wondering how this all connects to California. Well, it turns out that the name California predates the discovery of the Golden State by centuries. While there are a number of different theories as to the origin of the name California, this one seems very convincing:
California first appeared in a popular romance of chivalry called Las Sergas de Esplandián ('The Adventures of Esplandian'), written by Garcí Ordóñez de Montalvo around 1510. In this story there is a fabulous island, peopled by black Amazons and rich in gold and precious stones. The island is ruled over by a queen named Calafia and is called California. It is located "on the right hand of the Indies...very near to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise."
When the Spanish reached the tip of what is now Baja California in 1532, they thought it was an island and called it California after the fantastic island of riches in Montalvo's tale. The belief that California was an island persisted long after later expeditions explored the coastline to the north. A 1719 atlas prepared for George II still showed it separated from the mainland.
Montalvo probably made up the name California although the name Califerne appears in the mid-11th century French Song of Roland where Charlemagne laments:
Against me then the Saxon will rebel,
Hungar, Bulgar, and many hostile men,
Romain, Pullain, all those are in Palerne,
And in Affrike, and those in Califerne.
Since the Roland poem concerns the "evil" Saracens, it's possible that the poet derived "Califerne" from 'caliph'. Montalvo might also have been influenced by such similar names as Californo and Calafornina in Sicily or Calahorra in Spain.
So it is certainly possible that the name California is related to the Hebrew verb חלף. Perhaps this is not so surprising, considering that California is the home of the passing and changing fad...
It's clear by now that my indexing is taking much longer than I originally expected. And there have been a number of "distractions" that have come up during this time period. But I have received a few requests to continue to write even before the index is done. So just so you know that I continue to pay my electric bill (and that I'm still alive), I'll make sure to put up a regular post (although less frequently than before.)
Although I've spent most of my time indexing books and websites that I've used in the past, I have come across some new material. Well, new to me anyway. An amazing book that I picked up a couple of weeks ago is Yad Halashon (1964) by Yitzhak Avinery, the linguist also well known as the author of Heichal Rashi. This 600+ page book has hundreds of articles that Avinery wrote over a course of decades. The English subtitle calls it a "lexicon of linguistic problems in the Hebrew language." I'm sure I'll refer to it regularly, as it provides an important bridge between the Ben Yehuda's dictionary and innovations and the modern Hebrew I speak in 2007. There are not a few entries about words that I've already written about - but it will probably take even longer for me to go back and review them.
Anyway, on to today's post. In a 1949 article, Avinery makes a connection between two words: avukah אבוקה - "torch" and ptil פתיל - "wick, cord" (also ptila פתילה). The etymology of ptil is well known. It derives from the root פתל - "to twist, twine". It also means "to wrestle", and from here we get the origin of the name Naftali (see Bereshit 30:8).
The origin of avuka is less clear. Klein says the origin is unclear. He is probably following Ben Yehuda, who writes that "the origin of the word is not clear, but perhaps it is a shortened form of אבהוקה avhuka, from the root בהק - "to shine, glow".
However, there is an earlier etymology for avuka, as presented by the Ramban in his commentary to Bereshit 32:25 In this verse we find the root אבק as a verb:
וַיִּוָּתֵר יַעֲקֹב, לְבַדּוֹ; וַיֵּאָבֵק אִישׁ עִמּוֹ, עַד עֲלוֹת הַשָּׁחַר
"Yaakov was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn".
It is clear that the word ויאבק means "he wrestled", but what is the etymology? Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi in Chullin 91a provides two different theories:
וריב"ל אמר אמר קרא (בראשית לב) בהאבקו עמו כאדם שחובק את חבירו
"Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: The Torah writes (Bereshit 32:26) 'as he wrestled בהאבקו with him' - as a person embraces - chovek חובק - his friend".
אמר ר' יהושע ב"ל מלמד שהעלו אבק מרגלותם עד כסא הכבוד
"Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: this teaches us that the dust - avak אבק - of their feet went up to the Divine Throne."
Each of these explanations finds expression in the views of the Rishonim. Rashi quotes Menachem as saying that the verb אבק meant "he was covered in dust", because they were kicking up dirt while they were moving. This is in line with the second opinion of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, and is the view of Ibn Ezra and Radak.
Rashi brings a second opinion, saying that the word אבק is of Aramaic origin, and means "he attached himself." Heb brings a few Talmudic quotes where אבק means "attached", and then says that it is the way of two who struggle, for one person to throw the other down, then he grasps him - אובקו - and entwines him - חובקו -in his arms."
By connecting the roots אבק and חבק, Rashi here seems to be following the first opinion of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi.
The Ramban continues in this vein, and points out that alef and chet often interchange, and brings a number of examples. And getting back to the topic of this post, the Ramban writes that the word avuka meant "a bundle of sticks bound together". And here we see the similarity between ptil / ptila and avuka - both may originate from the idea of string or wood bound or twisted together.
Why did Avinery mention all this? Because he noticed that when people were talking about twisting someone's arm, they would say הוא מסובב את היד. But he points out that the root סובב means "to surround" - not "to twist". So he recommends using the verb ovek אובק - and here he is inspired by none other than Rashi, the subject of his major work. For it seems that Rashi coined the kal form of the verb אבק in his commentary we read above. (In Heichal Rashi, Avinery has a list of Hebrew words coined by Rashi.)
So while it would have made a nice Chanukah post to end with a discussion of wicks and torches, I can't leave out an interesting note about the word avak meaning "dust". Klein provides the following etymology:
Together with Aramaic-Syrian אבקא (= dust), probably derived from [the verb] אבק [related to the Arabic abaqa (= he ran away)] and literally meaning 'that which flees or flies.' ... Greek abax, genitive abakos (= a square tablet strewn with dust for drawing geometrical diagrams; reckoning board) is a Hebrew loan word.
So the word abacus may very well come from Hebrew. (See this Philologos article for a theory of how the word entered Greek from Hebrew.)
So maybe we can still connect all this to Chanukah after all. Two concepts which seem very much Greek - wrestling and abacus - both have a strong Hebrew background. Just to show that the relationship between the Jews and the Greeks wasn't always black and white, lightness and darkness...
Almost back to regular posting, but I came across something that I had to ask the readers here about.
There is a type of long grain rice called "basmati". All the etymologies I have seen say that basmati in Hindi means "fragrant". I immediately had an association with the Hebrew words bosem בוסם - "perfume", and besamim בשמים - "spices". (I wrote about those two words previously here.)
Now I know that the Hindi language was influenced by Muslim rule in India, and many Arabic and Persian words entered the language. However, I cannot find any source that says that basmati was one of those words. It does seem like more than just a coincidence.
As I wrote earlier, I've been spending my blogging time on trying to index my various sources, to make it easier to find places where a particular word or root is being discussed. It's taking a little longer than I thought, but I'm already seeing benefits. I've found a number of interesting words, and already have a new series lined up for when I get back to writing "full time".
However, despite my late night efforts at note taking, all is not "not fun and games". I have been playing Scrabulous, a form of online Scrabble, on Facebook (anyone interested in finding me can click here.)
Well, English Scrabble is fun and all, but this week my wife picked up the Hebrew version of the board game Scrabble. (Check out her blog post to see an amusing typo...)
I played the first time this morning with two of my kids. Before I started, I figured it would be very easy - it seemed like you can do more with Hebrew letters than English ones. But it was actually pretty challenging. First of all, there are a number of caveats about word forming:
The letters ב, כ, ל , מ can not be used as prefixes, unless the word as such appears in the dictionary (e.g. בהחלט, מפני)
The letter ה can not be used as a definitive article in the beginning of a word
You can't add an object at the end of a word (e.g. יאכלוהו - "they will eat it")
You can't use a word that is part of a pair of words, when it doesn't have any meaning alone (e.g. שמיכת, which is part of שמיכת חורף)
And while they don't mention it in the rules, I'm guessing you can't add the letter vav to the beginning of a word.
Also interesting was the point value for each letter (as marked inside each tile):
I wouldn't have guessed that kaf or bet would have such high values.
It was a fun game, and I got to teach the kids some new words. One of them I will share with you now. I put down the following word:
מ ר צ ד ת
When they asked what it meant, I hearkened back to my days in tech support at a government ministry, when people would call to complain about a מסך מרצד masach meratzed. They were talking about the computer monitor flickering (which could be usually resolved by adjusting the refresh rate.)
However, the dictionaries I consulted did not have that definition, but rather said that the root רצד meant "to dance". This is the popular translation of the word in Tehilim 68:17, but some also offer "ambush".
And this is what Klein writes for his entry on רצד:
Some lexicographers see in it a secondary form of רקד [dance], others connect it with Jewish Palestinian Aramaic רצד, Arabic rasada (=he watched with hostility).
In any case, I have no time left for dancing, or even for Scrabble. Back to the indexing...
Over the next several days, I'm going to be using my allocated "Balashon" time to better organize my sources. This should hopefully result in more interesting and robust posts.
In the meantime, I'm bumping this Kri and Ktiv game, since I never got any guesses...
So give it a shot! --------------------------------------------------------------------- a) just as bad b) Yaakov hit it
A belated congratulations to Omer for his solution of Game #5. He even put his own difficult challenge in the comments!
When I first lived in Israel in the early 1990s, it wasn't that easy to make an international phone call. You had to often speak to an operator, and then you would get put on hold, with a recording in a number of different languages - Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic and English (if I remember correctly). The only word that I remember from the recording was the Arabic word for "thank you" - shukran.
Now, all these years later, I started wondering - does shukran have a Hebrew cognate? Indeed it does. Stahl writes that shukran is related to the Hebrew word שכר sachar, meaning wages or reward. The verb שכר means "to hire, rent", and Klein also shows the connection to Arabic:
Phoenician שכר (=to hire), Ugaritic shkr (= to let out on hire, let), Arabic shakara (he rewarded, thanked), Ethiopian shekar ( = hired)
The name of the singer Shakira is also related, as it comes from the Arabic meaning grateful or thankful.
Continuing with the etymology of שכר, Ben Yehuda suggests that perhaps it was originally the shafel form of the Aramaic אגר or the Hebrew כרה. The root אגר means "to hire", and is familiar to us from the Mishnaic phrase לפום צערא אגרא - "according to the suffering is the reward." According to Klein, this is the root of the word אגרה agra - the fee for government services in Israel, and may also be the source of the word אגורה agora - a coin, now meaning one hundredth of a shekel.
The root כרה means "to buy, trade", and is related to the Arabic kara - "he let for hire".
One more root that may be connected is חכר, meaning "to lease". Klein writes that it is probably related to שכר.
Knowing that shukran is related to שכר may help me (and others) with a common mixup that English speakers have when speaking Hebrew. In English, "rent" is one of those rare verbs that can be used in more than one direction - he rented the apartment to a tenant, he rented the car from the company. In Hebrew however, the verbs are clearly different לשכור is to "rent from", whereas להשכיר is to "rent to". Knowing that shukran meant to give thanks - i.e. to give reward - makes it easier for me to remember that the verb לשכור means to give reward, to give payment.
I can think of one other English verb that has this same phenomenon - "to nurse". A mother nurses a child, a child nurses from a mother. And again in Hebrew, there are two different verbs - ינק and הניקה. And here too, I've heard English speakers get them mixed up when speaking Hebrew. Can anyone think of other examples? Shukran in advance...
I recently received a great gift (thanks!) - the unabridged Even-Shoshan dictionary, which includes etymologies. Flipping through it, I found something interesting.
I noticed the entry for pargit פרגית - meaning "young / spring chicken", also rendered poussin, pullet or Cornish game hen. (In Israeli restaurants, it means dark meat from the thigh of the chicken - particularly boneless chunks.) It said it likely comes from the Greek pterix (pterygos) meaning wing. When I saw that, the first word that came into my head was "pterodactyl", the extinct flying reptile. An interesting association, as long as it's etymological, not culinary!
It also is found in Tosefta Bava Metzia 6:5, parallel to the word efroach אפרוח meaning "chick". I haven't been able to find any difference between the two terms - perhaps it's an issue of age.
Jastrow tries to connect the two words, by saying that pargit derives from the verb פרג, meaning "to break through, sprout". The root פרח has the same meaning, from where he derives efroach. I assume here that Jastrow would include פרג and פרח together with a number of other roots beginning with פר that mean "to separate" or "to break out", such as פרץ, פרד, פרה, פרס and פרש.
However, first of all, it is not agreed by all that the somewhat obscure root פרג means "to sprout". Klein, for example, offers "worsened"; Ben Yehuda has "to be quite changed."
Secondly, as we've seen, Ben-Shoshan gave pargit a Greek etymology. He followed Ben-Yehuda, who disagreed with the majority of the researchers, including Loew, who said pargit had a Semitic origin.
Whether or not pargit and efroach are related, they both share an additional meaning - "a young woman". Pargit has the sense of an innocent, naive young woman.
On the other hand, the slang term frecha, is the Arabic cognate of efroach, also means a young woman, but with a different connotation. Haaretz gives this definition:
Mega-coutured female characterized by stiletto heels and language to match. Protective coloration provided by blinding if precision-executed patterns on nails of fingers and toes.
The slang term generally refers to Sefardic women, perhaps influenced by the North African Jewish name Frecha, which derives from the Arabic word farcha, meaning "joy".
English too has the term "chick" meaning "young woman", and in British slang "bird" as well. I wonder what causes these associations?
You may have noticed an unusual word in my previous post. I quoted Yeshayahu 54:12 -
וּשְׁעָרַיִךְ לְאַבְנֵי אֶקְדָּח
and provided the JPS translation:
"Your gates of precious stones (avnei ekdach)"
But if you're familiar with modern Hebrew, you would know that ekdach means "pistol, revolver". So what's the connection?
First, let's look at the biblical word, which only appears in this verse. The exact identity of the stone is not know, and so the JPS offers "precious stones." However, Targum Yonatan translates it as avnei gmar - and we have seen before that gmar means "coal" in Aramaic. Following the Targum, Rashi explains the word to be carbuncle, and that is offered by many other translations. Carbuncle is an obsolete word meaning "red precious stone", and gets its name from the "Latin carbunculus, small glowing ember, carbuncle, diminutive of carbō, carbōn-, coal". (Interestingly, carbuncle also means an infection of the skin, as does anthrax, which is also the Greek word meaning "coal".)
Klein says ekdach has a similar etymology to carbuncle:
Literally probably meaning 'flashing or sparkling stone' and derived from קדח (= to kindle). Compare Arabic qaddahah (= fire steel, fire iron).
The root קדח also means "to bore, to drill", and Klein feels that the meaning "to kindle" originally meant "to make fire by rubbing".
As far as ekdach meaning "revolver", this was a coinage of Ben Yehuda. In his dictionary, he says it means a weapon which shoots (fires) using firepower, which he derived from the root קדח - "to kindle, to burn". Based on this, Klein translates Ben-Yehuda's intention as "firearm".
However, lets look at the article where Ben Yehuda made his original suggestion (an article in his newspaper Hatzvi, 1896. The original can be viewed here, page 3.) He discusses there possible Hebrew words for "firearm" and rejects the term used at the time k'nei roveh קנה רובה, which Klein translates as "bowman's barrel". He says it sounds terrible in Hebrew, and would be difficult to make a plural of, conjugate, etc. David Yellin suggested shortening the word to roveh רובה, but Ben-Yehuda rejected that as well, for roveh should be the shooter, not the gun. (In the end, Modern Hebrew did adopt roveh for "rifle".)
Then he points out that many European languages have a word for a gun "in which a flint fixed in the hammer produces a spark that ignites the charge" - a flintlock in English. He therefore goes back to the stone ekdach, which based on Arabic, he connects to "flint". He points out that even if the actual stone referred to in Yeshayahu is identified, the word isn't commonly used, so there shouldn't be a problem appropriating the old word for a new meaning.
So if you like, when you hear the word ekdach, you can think of The Flintstones...
Could there be any connection between the word "Sisma" (a password) and the phrase, "open sesame?" Should the word "Sisma" be spelled with an Aleph or a Heh? What language did the word Sisma come from?
Let's first look at the word sisma. Surprisingly, I could only find one reference to it in all pre-modern Hebrew literature. It appears in Midrash Shmuel, a relatively late midrash (perhaps compiled around 1050), in the following quote:
אלולי שעשו סיסמא ביניהון "unless they had agreed upon certain signals between themselves" (Jastrow's translation, who feels that the word is a plural - "fixed signals")
The word appears here with an alef at the end. I don't know when the word began to be used again in Hebrew - Ben Yehuda makes no mention of it in his dictionary, most likely because he viewed it as being a foreign (Greek) word. Whoever did reintroduce this word in to Hebrew, besides having a real knack for finding obscure words, chose to spell it with a heh at the end: סיסמה, and that is the spelling you will find in current Hebrew dictionaries. In modern Hebrew it also carries the meaning of "slogan, motto", in addition to the older sense of "signal, password".
As far as the etymology, Klein writes the following:
Greek syssemon (=signal), formed from Greek syn (=with, together with) and sema (=sign).
He points out that is related to the word siman סימן, also meaning "sign, signal" and deriving from Greek sema.
Now while the English word "sesame" does sound similar to the Hebrew word sisma, they are not related. Sesame has the following etymology:
c.1440, probably from M.Fr. sisame, from L. sesamum (nom. sesama), from Gk. sesamon (Doric sasamon) "seed or fruit of the sesame plant," via Phoenician from Late Babylonian *shawash-shammu (cf. Assyrian shamash-shammu "sesame," lit. "oil-seed")
The Hebrew word for sesame, שומשום, also was borrowed from the Akkadian (Assyrian). How is the word pronounced? Ask the average Israeli, and they'll likely tell you sumsum. However, all the dictionaries, and vocalized editions of the mishna have shumshum. (For those readers who weekly recite Bameh Madlikin - have you noticed that the siddur has shemen shumshumin?)
Why the disparity between the official spelling and the "street" pronunciation? I don't believe that it comes from the Israeli version of Sesame Street - רחוב סומסום - Rechov Sumsum, deliberately spelled with a samech. The pronunciation predates the show by many years, and the name of the show reflects popular usage. (I assume the spelling was changed to make it easier for younger viewers. Having a sin / shin might have been too confusing.)
Rather, the pronunciation was likely influenced by a foreign language. Perhaps it came from the European languages, which as we noted derived from Greek (who did not have a "sh" sound, e.g. Shmuel -> Samuel). But I think it is more likely that modern Hebrew was influenced by the Arabic rendition of the word: simsim. As we've seen before, the Hebrew shin becomes "s" in Arabic (shalom -> salam).
What is the meaning of the phrase? There are a number of theories as to why simsim would have been the word used as the charm to open the gate. Perhaps the most interesting theory to me was presented by regular Balashon commenter Moshe M, who wrote to me that in addition to sesame, simsim can mean in Arabic "gate" (although it's a rare literary word). He heard this from Prof. Jonas C. Greenfield. Therefore the phrase meant "Open O Gate". (Ali Baba's own brother did not understand this apparently, and when he couldn't remember simsim, he tried guessing other foods, trying "Open barley", "Open wheat", and "Open chick-pea").
In this article, Greenfield shows us a Hebrew cognate for simsim meaning "gate". In Yishayahu 54:12, we find a difficult term:
"I will make your battlements of rubies, Your gates of precious stones, The whole encircling wall of gems"
The question is the translation of the word shimshotayich שמשותיך, offered by the JPS as "battlements". This seems to be the opinion of Rashi, quoting Midrash Tehilim, based on Tehilim 84:12. However, Radak, and Menachem as quoted by Rashi, say that shimsha שמשה here means "a solid, translucent piece, placed in the window, that lets the sun in". This is its meaning in modern Hebrew as well - "windowpane".
However, Greenfield writes that shimsha here means "gates" as well, which is parallel to shaar שער "gate", found in the second section of the verse.
I'll conclude with the observations about sesame by comedian Mitch Hedberg. (Warning: Contains mild language).
. Mike sent me the following entry:
by Eric Partridge, he connects the English word "heap" to Sanskrit "
, by Nicholas Oster. On page 270, he writes in the footnote:
), he explains what "the love of Rome" meant: