2713: Mythical Whale Names in Hebrew and Arabic May 25, 2024
Like several other modern words, the word for ‘whale’ in Modern Hebrew is from a mythical beast, here לויתן (Levitan) which in English is rendered “Leviathan”, a sea-monster. While there is a history of turning biblical monsters into normal animals has happened elsewhere, this case is distinct in that there are some translations in the Book of Jonah that feature a whale, but this is from the Hebrew דג גדול (dag gadol) literally “big fish”, and whether or not that refers to a whale, it would not make for a suitable term.
Many of Modern Hebrew’s words were also created to draw upon Arabic, whose word for a whale is حوت (ḥout) which is not related to any in Hebrew, but also almost certain was from an earlier word for some kind of sea-monster, either from a variation of حَيَّة (ḥaya) meaning ’snake’ with an ending more meaning “sea-snake” or from a typical Semitic root ح ي و (ḥ-y-w) meaning ‘live’ having once referred to some kind of ancient beast. This is different to the Islamic Whale, a whale believed to be holding up the Earth in a supposed cosmic ocean.
2711: (More) Hebrew Words That Have Shifted Meaning May 23, 2024
Modern Hebrew has lots of names for plants and animals taken from either Biblical- or Mishnaic Hebrew that no longer map onto the animals they once did. In some tamer cases, this would include the modern word for ‘watermelon’ אבטיח (evtiach) which in Biblical Hebrew just meant ‘melon’, or the word ‘cucumber’ קישוא (kishua) now used for zucchini/courgette.
In more surprising cases, the word for a ‘hippopotamus’ is, at least formally בהמות (behemot) which people may note from the English word ‘behemoth’ colloquially used to refer to a big thing, but which is a Biblical river-dwelling monster, and literally means “animals”: plural in form but singular in nature. That said, many people now say “ סוס היאור” a translation of ‘hippopotamus’ from Greek meaning “river/water horse”, with היאור meaning “river” but more typically “the Nile”. This occurs in other other animal names like קרנף (karnaf), a calque of the Greek “rhinoceros” for “horn-nose”.
2706: Biblical Monsters Used for Crocodiles May 18, 2024
The Hebrew word for ‘crocodile’ is based off of a semitic root, but not from the one used in Arabic تمساح (timsaḥ) which is also what spread around many crocodile non-inhabiting areas that had Arabic influence, appearing in this form in several Turkic languages. Another Semitic word for a crocodile exists in the Amharic አዞ (azo). While Arabic’s form is from Coptic, originally from an Ancient Egyptian root m-z-ḥ, Modern Hebrew uses a completely different (for the most part) yet also ancient word: תנין (tanin). This is from Biblical Hebrew, frequently mentioned as early as Genesis 1:21, which clearly depicts the תנין as a sea monster, not as a regular animal. This was not a mixed-use word either; Modern Hebrew uses it, as it does for many monster-to-animal word decisions when the language was revitalized as a common, native language in the late 19th/ early 20th centuries. A Hebrew word תמסח (timsaḥ) is also used, but it is highly dated compared to תנין (tanin). One notable inclusion is the translation of the plague of צפרדע (tzfarda(im)) as ‘crocodiles’ instead of the far more common ‘frogs’, which is now also the Hebrew for ‘frogs’.
