2718: Hebrew’s Vowels: The "Mater Lectionis" in Semitic Languages May 30, 2024
There is a term, mater lectionis, which is a Latin calque of a Hebrew term אם קריאה (em kria) meaning “mother of reading”, used to describe consonants being used to represent vowels. This is not something that really happens outside of Semitic languages, due to their use of abjads, instead of alphabets, that never represent vowels in the letters. This is different to using those letters to transliterate from other languages.
In Hebrew, this happens with the letters aleph א, hei ה, vav ו and yod י, where already ו and י more often represent a vowel than a consonant. This will most commonly happen at the end of a word, though there are exceptions in both ways. For instance, a yod י at the beginning of a word sounds like [j] as in ירושלים (yerushalayim) meaning ‘Jerusalem’, where both yods י still keep their consonantal properties, but in the word ירושלמי (yerushalmi) i.e. “Jerusalemite” the yod י at the end only acts like a vowel [i], not [ji] (i.e. “ee”, not “yee”). In fact, these letters are not randomly associated with vowels; when they lose their consonant-ness, vav ו goes from [v] to either [o] or [u], yod י becomes [i], and hei ה becomes [a] or [e] usually, though in some names of people or places it remains as [o], like ‘Shiloh’ שלה. In the case of aleph א it is these days treated as a mater lectionis, but as a consonant it represents a glottal stop, like in שאל (sha’al), and is not actually silent as many people claim.
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’.
2639: Ladino Use for Solitario (Extra Hebrew Diacritics) Mar 9, 2022
Solitario and Rashi script uses diacritics for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. This is also the case in modern Hebrew writing, but not as much in Yiddish, which used digraphs etc., possible inspired by German which has many of the same. Presently, Hebrew only has one digraph, which is נג <ng> like it is found in English, German, and Yiddish for the [ŋ] sound. In Solitario used for Ladino, this was not the convention, and diacritics were added to letters. For instance, the [dʒ] sound in the word 'Jump' or 'Giraffe' is written ג׳ or גﬞ from the basic ג [g], but in Yiddish this is written -דזש <dzsh>. The only similarity between Ladino and Yiddish conventions when it comes to non-Hebrew sounds is that Yiddish also used פֿ to represent [f] as opposed to [p].
Overall, not including the ones used in Biblical Hebrew (of which there would be an additional 5), Solitario used the added forms:
זﬞ for [ʒ] (like 'viSion' or French 'Je')
טﬞ for [θ] as in 'THree'
גﬞ for [dʒ] as in Jump
2638: Solitario Script Mar 8, 2022
For all Hebrew handwriting, it does not look like printed Hebrew exactly but uses its own modern semi cursive handwriting. Like Rashi script, Solitario was a Sephardic semi cursive font used for Spanish, Ladino, and Arabic around the Mediterranean. Unlike the Ashkenazi script which grew out of it in many ways, there are more ligatures (i.e. letters joined together), and there were more diacritics used for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. It is also the ancestor of the modern Israeli Hebrew script, though one could not read Solitario immediately if he only knew modern Hebrew cursive.
2573: chutzpa Dec 29, 2021
The English word 'chutzpah' is from Hebrew via Yiddish meant, 'insolence' or 'audacity', but took on meaning more of 'grit' or 'moxie' as time went on. This is not entirely always negative, but does connote a strong sense of arrogance. Meanwhile, the Arabic cognate حصافة (ḥaṣāfah) means really the exact opposite with 'strong judgement'.
2537: "Change" in Hebrew Root Letters Nov 23, 2021
Broadly speaking, Hebrew uses a system of 3-consonant roots are modified in various ways that change the meaning etc.. It is therefore important to retain these 3 letters as the core of the word, though there are some exceptions. Roots can end with a vowel sound for instance, and that will have certain implications, but sometimes the spelling conventions will change for a less grammatical reason. The for עשאה (ʔasa'ah) meaning 'make it' exists from the root letters ע-ש-ה meaning 'to do' but the א is added only because normally it would be another ה, either of which at the end are silent, usually. In actual fact, the final ה has aspiration in some cases (as is the case here) like the H in the 'house'. To retain the silence of what would be the first ה of עשהה, it is changed to עשאה.
2529: sinai Nov 15, 2021
Sinai is certainly a famous place due to its significance in the Bible, but the etymology of it is unclear. The area was known in Ancient Egypt as a place for mining turquoise as was called 'Biau' (mining). It is therefore thought that the Hebrew סיני (sinei) is from the name of the moon-deity of the Mesopotamian pantheon (and its ancient Egyptian equivalent Thoth), who was associated with the area by locals, given that the desert on the peninsula around the mountain in Hebrew is known as מדבר סין (midbar sin) and nearby is the desert מדבר סיני (midbar sinei).
2490: How נ Became Short Oct 6, 2021
Hebrew, effectively has 3 ways of scripts, hand writing, printed, and liturgical script. These are mostly the same, and the reasons for the evolution of each helps to elucidate the differences in each. For instance the letter נ—pronounced /nun/ and an ancestor to N—(except as it appears word-final) is the same length as other letters standardly in print and new liturgical writing, but at the end of the word it goes low (ן). In hand-written script though, it is long both times and is distinguished by being straight at the end of a word, and curved otherwise. However, before a few centuries ago both forms were long in formal holy writing; the reason being that in the beginning/middle of a word, its base juts out and causes the concern of interfering with the following letter.
2478: Hebrew Jussive: Not Just the Future Sep 24, 2021
There is a myth that Hebrew has no jussive subjunctive (such as English "let's" or "let there be"), as in most cases this looks to be the imperfect , signifying uncompleted action. For instance, the line in the opening of the Bible:
יהי אור ויהי־אור (yahi ohr vayahi ohr) can be translated as "let there be light, and there was light" or "there will be light, and there was light". In some instances this has led to obvious mistranslations, because the truth is in most contexts, there is no difference in the form of the word between the two. There are some instances where the two would differ however—proving that there is a difference in form—such as: ישם in
ישא יי פניו אליך וְיָשֵׂם לך שלום
pronounced (yasem) for the subjective meaning "may he place" as opposed to יָשִׂים (yasim) "he will place".
2474: Hebrew's (Potential) Accusative Case Sep 20, 2021
Biblical Hebrew uses the suffix -ה (a-) to indicate motion-towards: a common feature of the accusative case, which otherwise is used to mark direct objects. Hebrew already has a direct object marker for definite nouns—את (es)—but no way to mark indefinite nouns. Historically however, it would seem that this suffix -ה (a-) would have, whether or not the noun was definite. This accusative form was mostly lost with this one lingering use and a few potential vestigial forms in vocabulary, but some have even suggested that on top of that an early variety of Hebrew had a nominative */-u/ ending for subjects, and genitive */-i/ ending for possessives, but there is less evidence here.
2459: Semitic Definite Article Sep 5, 2021
Two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, have on the surface two differently sourced definite articles, ה־ (ha-) in Hebrew and ٱلْـ (al-) in Arabic, but some linguistics think otherwise. They surmise that originally there was a form هل۔/הל־ (hal-) used in a proto-Semitic language and as they two diverged, this form did as well, splitting in two separate ways. Not everyone agrees with this, and even those who would agree to the idea principle, they propose different forms. Some of these include in Arabic لا (lā) either through metathesis or as a different particle that eventually took on the meaning of a determiner.
2450: Hebrew סלמון: Overproduced [l] Sound Aug 26, 2021
The Hebrew סלמון [salmon] is directly taken from the English, including the now-not-silent [l]. What makes this even more remarkable is that there was never a point in English the L was pronounced in 'salmon' and in Middle English the word was 'samoun'; before this the Old English 'leax' (related to ‘lox‘) was used. The L was added in association with the original Latin root, but it's unclear where this comes from. This process of adding traditional but unproductive letters from Latin was pretty common, as in 'indict' or 'island'.
2423: Is 'Taurus' (Bull) Semitic? Aug 9, 2021
The Latin 'taurus', Greek ταύρος (tauros) and Lithuanian 'tauras' all could come from the Proto-Indo-European PIE *tau-ro- meaning 'bull', but this could actually be Semitic. The Aramaic for 'bull' is תור (tor), in Hebrew שור (shor), and Arabic ثور (thawr) and so on throughout the whole Semitic family. Meanwhile, many Indo-European languages do not have a word descended from this root, such as in many Indo-Iranian languages, or other related languages spoken further the East. Some notably may have exceptions to this, as in Persian or Avestan with a similar word for horses, or Sanskrit sthura- (thick; standing firm) related to the Old English 'steer'. It could be that those missing cases are simply lacking data, or that this is a wanderwort.
2404: @ in Hebrew and German Jul 19, 2021
The modern Hebrew word for the @ symbol is שטרודל (strudel), as in the German dessert. This is coincidental that both the pastry and the symbol are from the same name, but in German, and also Yiddish whence the Hebrew derives, this literally means 'whirlpool' and is supposed to be reminiscent of something twisting and spinning. In German, the word for the @ symbol is 'der Klammeraffe' which means 'spider monkey', though 'Klammer' on its own does not mean 'spider' but rather 'bracket'.
2399: Hebrew's Relationship to Chicken Jul 14, 2021
Technically, Hebrew has a distinct word for 'chicken' which is תרנגולת (tarnigolet) but this really only refers to a live chicken, specifically a hen. The word עוף (óf) is used for when referring to the meat, but this is also another word more generally meaning 'bird'. This is still the generic term for any bird in Modern Hebrew, and itself is related from the לעוף (la'uf) meaning 'to fly' but over time it gained another connotation. As it happens Israel is the number 1 consumer of chicken per capita globally, so perhaps this is not without reason.
2373: Biblical Loan Words Jun 17, 2021
Over the years, a number of collections have been arranged of word in Biblical Hebrew that are from other sources, including non-Semitic ones. Of course, some of these will be obvious, such as פרעה ('pharaoh') from Ancient Egyptian probably or קוף (qof) meaning 'monkey' from either Tamil or Sanskrit, considering that these concepts would not be native. Considering also the timespan of Bible, some of these sources will be found later historically after centuries of contact with other civilizations in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. However, even in the Writings (כתובים) which has the greatest percentage, even a inclusive estimate would put total loan words from any language at less than 2% of all vocabulary.
2372: South Arabian Languages Jun 16, 2021
South Arabian languages, mainly confined to Oman, Yemen (including Soqotri) along with Kuwait. These were once thought to be descendents of Old South Arabian—a collection of four Yemenite languages—but were later reclassified as West Semitic along with Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopian Semitic languages: basically any living Semitic language. Still, these diverged from other Semitic languages early, and are closer related to Ethiopian Semitic languages rather than Arabic, though these are far from mutually intelligible. These languages (Bathari, Harsusi, Hobyót, Mehri–Soqotri, Shehri) are known for having certain archaic features, especially when it comes to phonology, lost in other Semitic languages.
2367: Anomalous: The Rare Dagesh in Guttural Letters Jun 11, 2021
Hebrew uses a system of diacritics to represent vowels, but also to represent other phonetic changes. Still, there are some anomalous cases in the Torah. The dagesh—appearing as a dot in the middle of a letter—distinguishes basically 2 features; either it will distinguish between plosive or fricative forms in six letters: בג"ד כת"פ (note that not all of these are still productive) but more often the dagesh is used as a דגש חזק ('strong dot') indicating gemination. This latter use is found in all other letters to effectively double that particular sound but those mentioned above and the 'guttural letters': א, ה, ח, ע, and in many ways ways ר. This last case, ר (reish), representing [ʁ] or [ʀ] is found in at least 17 cases, which is still very few, that are throughout the Prophets and Writings. Even fewer exceptional cases—about four—are found with א (aleph) even though this is often taken as a 'silent letter', such as in Genesis 43:26, Leviticus 23:17, and neither of these have other vowels added.