Words and
their History[1]
by E. Y. Kutscher – – Ariel vol. 25 (1969) pp. 64-74
Reprinted by David Steinberg with permission of
copyright holders
Professor E. Y. Kutscher,
Professor of Hebrew Philology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member
of the Hebrew Language Academy, has written on the linguistic background of the
Isaiah Scroll from Qumran and on “Words and Their History.” Recipient of the
2. Hebrew Words which have Passed
into Other Languages
3. Foreign Words which
have Passed into Hebrew
3.1
Foreign Words Borrowed in Antiquity – prior to 600 CE
3.2 Foreign Words
Borrowed in the Jewish Middle Ages –Seventh to Eighteenth Centuries
4. Words and the Reality of
Life in Ancient Israel
4.1 Vocabulary
Illustrating what was Important
4.2 The Problem of
Dialect in Understanding Biblical Words
4.3 Native
Vocabulary Reflecting the Life of Israelite Farmers and Loan Words that of
Traders
4.4 Vocabulary Relating to Ethics and Law
4.5 Vocabulary
of the Bible – Only a Portion of the Living Vocabulary of Biblical Times
5. Broadening the Vocabulary –
Modern Israeli Hebrew
The Vocabulary of a language is a faithful reflection of the people who
speak it. Living conditions, past and present,
geographical environment , employment and pursuits, relations with neighbors,
culture and civilization, ideas and history are all mirrored in the words of a
language.
Hebrew words have undergone three kinds of transformation[2]:
·
words
which remained in Hebrew;
·
words
which passed from foreign languages into Hebrew; and,
·
words
which passed from Hebrew into foreign languages.
And there are at least two different
forms of change in each of the last two categories:
·
changes
in the form of the word itself; and,
·
changes
in the meaning of the word, when the host language translated the Hebrew word
by a word of its own, by adding to it the Hebrew meaning, a process known in
English as “loan-translation” and in French as “calque.[3]”
2. Hebrew Words which have Passed
into Other Languages
Let us begin with Hebrew words
which have passed from Hebrew to other Languages. Already in biblical times certain Hebrew
words (more precisely Canaanite)
passed into Greek; two examples are kharutz[4]
(“gold”) khrusos in Greek, still used
today in English in the name of the flower chrysanthemum, and eravon (“pledge”) which entered Greek as
arrabon and thence the Latin arrabo.
Particularly
interesting are certain loan-translations still in
normal, current use to this day. In
Akkadian the word qaqqadu – “head”
also has the meaning “capital”; consequently the Hebrew rosh has the same connotation, and similarly its cognate in Aramaic and other
languages. Through the Phoenician
influence we find the word kephalaion
with both meanings in Greek, from which in turn is derived by the same process
the Latin caput. The chain continues into Old High German with
Houbetgelt (“head-money”). The Latin word itself passed into other
European languages and the term “capital” is a derivation. In its career this loan-translation entered
Arabic, changing its form to ras-el-mal
(“capital”) and thence back into medieval Hebrew as rosh-mamon (“capital”).
Another instructive example is the use made in
Christian times of words derived from the Hebrew אב (av
– “father”). In Mishanic Hebrew we find the
Aramaic אבא (abba), the earliest
written form of which appears in the New Testament in Mark 14:36. The word followed hard in the wake of the
spread of Christianity throughout
3. Foreign Words which
have Passed into Hebrew
3.1 Foreign Words Borrowed in Antiquity – prior to
600 CE
There are also genuine Aramaic words which have
passed into Hebrew, sometimes in several forms.
The Hebrew makhatz (“crush”)
is found in the Bible (Judges
A further
interesting example of Aramaic influence on Hebrew, from another aspect, is the
word לאתר (le’altar
– “immediately”) fromעל אתר (`al ‘atar – “on the
spot”). There are several Aramaic terms
in which the consonantal `ayin has
weakened into an aleph, and the aleph was likely to disappear altogether. Thus על אתר (`al ‘atar”) becomes אלתר (‘altar) and, with the addition of ל (le) the preposition
(as in לבד levad – “alone” from the
root בדד badad), becomes לאלתר (le‘altar), whence the
Israeli Hebrew verb אלתר (‘alter
– “to improvise”).
Aramaic was important in
another respect: it served as a medium for the introduction into Hebrew of
words from Akkadian,
the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians, though it is true that many Akkadian
terms found their way into Hebrew in a period preceding the influences of
Aramaic. Akkadian bequeathed not only
words of its own, such as מחיר (mekhir – “price) but
also words of Sumerian origin (the Sumerians were a
non-Semitic (speaking) people living in what is today southern Iraq, before the
coming of the Akkadians). The most
obvious of these is היכל (heikhal – “palace”
or “temple”), which is e-gal (“a
large house”) in Sumerian. From the same
language comes מלח (malakh – “sailor”), though it may have
entered Hebrew via Aramaic.
In
Mishnaic Hebrew, too we find words borrowed from the Akkadian. Khazan appears in the Tel-el-Amarna
letters written in the fourteenth century BCE by the kings of Syrian and
Persian rule in Eretz Israel (from the
sixth to the fourth century BCE) led to the introduction of Iranian words into
Biblical and Rabbinic[6]
Hebrew, and Persian rule in Babylonia (until it conquest by the Arabs in the
seventh century CE) brought them into the Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud,
from which they entered Israeli Hebrew.
Among the most striking are: ורד (vered – “rose,”
actually the same word etymologically!)
The name of the island, Rhodes, comes from the same root; the most
ancient form is Vrodos, “island of
roses”; פרדס (pardess)
is also from Persia, and since this is the term, also taken over by the Greek,
by which the Septuagint[7]
translates gan eden (“the Garden of
Eden”), it has passed into various European languages as ”paradise” in English,
“Paradies” in German and so on. The word
kegon (“for example”) is based on the
Persian gon
(“color”).
Hellenistic culture which
inundated
The number of Latin words in Mishnaic Hebrew is comparatively small, in
spite of the Roman conquest of
Palestine (from the first
century BCE onwards). Examples are ligyon (“legion”) and לבלר (lavlar - “scribe”, “clerk”), though we do not revert
to a form closer to the Latin libellarius,
namely ליבלר (livlar),
found in manuscripts of the Mishna, preferring that which emerged in recent
centuries in
3.2
Foreign Words
Borrowed in the Jewish Middle Ages –Seventh to Eighteenth Centuries
In the
Middle Ages the Jews played a major role in the syncretistic Arabic
culture of
3.3 Foreign Words Borrowed in the Modern period – Late
Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
A
characteristic attendant upon the revival of Hebrew at the end of the
eighteenth century was an influx of European words which has continued up to
the present day. Here the process has
two aspects: the introduction of words of an international character, and the
use of loan-translations.
Already at the beginning of the period we find the word לבד (levad
– “alone”) used with the meaning of “but”; comparison with contemporary German
solves the problem: at that time “allein” meant both “but” and “alone.” The German “Mittelschule” – “high school” was
first translated literally bet sefer
benayim and today bet sefer tikhon. The German “Kindergarten” is in Modern Hebrew
gan-yeladim
(“children’s garden”). And what Hebrew
speaker would conceive that aviron
(“airplane”), formed from the word אויר (avir
– “air”), itself a Greek borrowing found in the Mishna, is an attempt to
imitate French avion?
Such
coinages, i.e., the use of Hebrew words phonetically resembling the foreign
words whose meanings they were to take over, were common in the nineteenth
century when revivers of the language did not yet dare to create genuinely new
terms. Instead of “telegraph” they said dilug-rav (“a large leap”); instead of
“cannon” they said keneh-on
(“power-barrel”), while “cholera” was rendered kholi-ra (“a bad sickness”).
Of the neologisms of this character the only one which still maintains
some kind of existence is pratei-kol
– “protocol” which literally means “details of everything,” though
generally the new term zikhron-devarim is used for “minutes”
(of a meeting). This method is no longer
used, though occasionally it reappears as in kef (“cape” e.g. Cape of Good hope); actually the Hebrew word means
“rock”, whereas “cape” is related to the Latin “caput” meaning “head.”
In
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
4. Words and the Reality of Life in
Ancient
4.1
Vocabulary Illustrating what was Important
In the
same was as these loan-translations but to a much greater extent, the native
Hebrew vocabulary can throw light on the character, history and living conditions
of the Jewish people. Even without the
Biblical account of the wanderings of our forefathers in the wilderness we
should be able to assess the importance of the desert in our past history from
the number of words for it in Hebrew: midbar,
eretz-tziya, kharerim and so on. The
many words for “cloud” – ‘anan, ‘av,
‘arafel etc., bear eloquent witness to the anxiety with which our
ancestors, tillers of the soil, watched the skies, waiting for the bountiful
rain. And, of course, the ancient
Judaean husbandman could specify the different kinds of rain – geshem, matar, zarzif, yoreh, malkosh. We no longer know how to distinguish between
most of the Biblical words for “rain” and “cloud,” or, to quote another
example, between the different terms for “spring,” ‘ayin, ma’ayan, מוצא
(motza), מקור (makor) and the
like.
4.2 The
Problem of Dialect in Understanding Biblical Words
Here an
important point must be made. What we
have here may not indicate different types of sources of water, but
corresponding terms in various Hebrew dialects (and obviously the same
possibility exists in regard to other examples cited). In the period of the
Similarly
it is at least worth considering , for example, whether the word מוצא(motza),
in the sense of “spring,” might not have been restricted to the dialect of the
Or take the words har and giv’a.
Ostensibly they mean “mountain” and “hill” respectively, and this is how
they are translated in the Septuagint, and in the Aramaic and Syriac
versions. Nevertheless, there is no
certainty that these were their main meanings, and, in fact in the Bible we
find the word giv’a in such
expressions as high giv’a (I Kings
This assumption is corroborated when we examine the distribution of these
words in place names in
4.3 Native
Vocabulary Reflecting the Life of Israelite Farmers and Loan Words that of
Traders
The areas covered in the
discussion so far – words for clouds, rain, topographical features – reflect
the fact that our forbearers were principally husbandmen. Further evidence is furnished by the
comparatively large number of words for “ditch,” “cistern,” “well” and the like,
where again we are at a loss to establish the exact meaning of each. How harsh existence was for the Judaean
peasant is indicated by the multitude of words for thorns and thistles: kotz, dardar, kharulim, barkanim – thee
are more than twenty in all! How native
agriculture was, is proved by the complete absence of foreign loan words in
this field.
In the
vocabulary of commerce, by contrast, we find that in both Biblical and Mishanic
Hebrew most of the words are of alien provenance. The mekhir
(“price”) that you pay is Akkadian as is the shetar (“bill”) that you must sign. Pinkas (“ledger”) is Greek, khenvani (“shopkeeper”) is Aramaic and tagar (“merchant”) is Akkadian.
It is no coincidence that in the Bible a merchant is called a
“Canaanite” (Proverbs 31:24), but in German a “Jude.”
4.4
Vocabulary Relating to Ethics and Law
It may be dangerous to make deductions from silence. Anti-Semites once maintained that Jews were
devoid of “conscience” because the modern Hebrew word used in this sense,
namely the term matzpun means something else in the
Bible. Matzpun meaning “conscience” only entered the language in the Middle
Ages. To which the reply was made that
Jews apparently were equally lacking in spleen because the Hebrew word tekhol does not appear in the Bible either!
In the same way as agricultural terms in Hebrew are thoroughly native in
origin, so are all those relating to ethics and institutionalized Judaism: tzedaka (“righteousness”), mishpat (“justice”), khesed (“charity”), rakhamim (“mercy”) and so on.
The people of
4.5
Vocabulary of the Bible – Only a Portion of the Living Vocabulary of Biblical
Times
The word tekhol (just cited
in another reference) provides convincing proof that not the entire Hebrew
vocabulary of Bible times is contained in the Bible[13]. This is corroborated by the fact that in the Siloam inscription
we find the word (nikba – “tunnel”),
unknown to us from any other source.
Another word from ancient Hebrew documents, which, however, has not
entered the modern vernacular is n-tz-p
(perhaps pronounced netzef). This root does not occur in Hebrew
(literature), but from comparison with Arabic it is clear that it signifies
“half” or “half of a given weight.” The
renowned student of Palestinian flora, Rabbi I. LÖw, found that there are about
three hundred words pertaining to agriculture in Mishnaic Hebrew, many of which
do not occur in the Bible, while some are unknown in any other Semitic
Language. Seraf (“resin”) is but one
example.
5. Broadening the Vocabulary –
Modern Israeli Hebrew[14]
Our discussion, up to the
present, has served to demonstrate the extent to which the Hebrew vocabulary
reflects the conditions of life of the Jewish people down the ages. Let us now examine the composition of the
vocabulary of the modern spoken language.
In the revival of Hebrew three
main methods were adopted in broadening
the vocabulary and making it a vehicle for modern intercourse, especially
in the intellectual and technological spheres.
·
First
ancient “source-books” – the Bible,
Mishna and Talmud, medieval poetry and other literature – were combed for terms which could be reused in a modern context. For flora, for example, the Mishna and Talmud
are a rich source; they have furnished the words aspesset (“lucerne”), orez
(“rice”), kalanit (“anemone”), selek (“beetroot”), sh’eu’it (“beans”) and a host of others. This is equally true of other areas. Most of these words were not in use two
generations ago, and it was only the efforts of scholars and members of the
Hebrew Language Committee, and its successor, the Academy of the Hebrew
Language, which have rescued them from oblivion.
·
Another method was to ascribe new
meaning to old words. Mokesh can serve as an example. In the Bible it means “snare” or “trap”;
today it is used in the sense of an (explosive) “mine.” Musaf,
a term for one of the weekly prayers has today become a “supplement” (of a
newspaper). This word typifies a trend
in modern Hebrew – namely conversion of religious words to secular use. This method is not without its dangers. By retransference strange misconceptions may
arise in the minds of Israeli children reading the Bible e.g., that the
Canaanites were a “mine” for their ancestors, and indeed a young girl in this
country explained to me that the Canaanites sowed mines! Consequently there is today a tendency to
oppose innovations of this kind, at least as far as Biblical words are
concerned.
·
The third and commonest method is to
create new words from existing roots. How much we stood in need of
even the simplest everyday concepts is proved by the modern term for
“kitchen.” In the past all sorts of
compounds were used; khaddar-habishul
(“cooking room”) – still used by the writer S. Y. Agnon, and beit-habishul (“cookhouse”) are but two
examples. The innovators preferred
simple, not compound, words, so taking the root טבח (t-b-kh) meaning “slaughter” and also “cook” they created מטבח (mitbakh). Apparantly the choice of this root and form
was influenced by the fact that the cognate is in current use in Arabic. But there were no words for kitchen utensils
and for different kinds of food. The
word mis’adah (“restaurant”) also, is
a neologism. The root occurs in the
Bible and from it a new word was coined.
A similar situation existed in
regard to household furniture. The
Shunamite woman (II Kings
Classical and post-Classical
Hebrew literature was closely examined to fill the gaps. In the Bible meltakha (“wardrobe”), a word of obscure origin, was found, and in
the Mishna miznon. On the assumption that the latter was a
derivative of the root zon (“to
feed”) it was given the meaning of “cupboard.”
Only recently has it become clear that miznon is of Greek origin, signifying some sort of tray.
The problem in regard to parts
of the body was less difficult; indeed, here the modernists were frequently
confronted with an embarrass de richesse. “Nose,” for instance, is af in the Bible, but khotem
in the Mishna. One scholar, the late
Joseph Klausner, Professor of Hebrew Literature at the
There is no end to innovations
in the domain of technology.
Understandably, few were founding ancient sources and the majority have
been borrowed from foreign tongues. The
Greek mekhane has been given a Hebrew
garb in mekhona for “machine.” Hence mekhonit
for “motor-car,” and, by dropping the “kh”
we have monit, a taxi, which looks as
if it were related to the root מנה
(mnh – “to count”) and is thus
closer to the original meaning of “taxi” (which, of course, is short for
“taximeter”).
In most cases, however, it proved
necessary to create new words from Hebrew or Aramaic roots. The Biblical tzelem (“image,” “form”) was
used to form tzilem (“to
photograph”), and hence the words tatzlum (“a photograph”), matzelma (“camera”), and tzalmania (“photographic studio”)
No modern
army can make do with the keshet
(“bow”) and khetz (“arrow”) of the
Bible. The words roveh and totakh, both
Biblical in origin, were given the meanings of “rifle” and “cannon”
respectively; but for “machine-gun” mikla
was coined, from the word in the Bible meaning “to sling stones.”
New words
formed from initial letters are not uncommon in modern Hebrew, e.g., duakh from din vekheshbon (“report”), which has produced a new verb ledave’akh (“to report”).
A similar
method of word formation is the fusion of two words in one. Tapuakh-zhav (lit. “golden
apple” - “orange”) has become tapuz. There is also tapuakh-adama (lit. “ground-apple” a loan-translation of the German
Erdapfel). These two have given rise to another compound
tapuakh-etz (lit. “tree-apple”) – a
tautologous form, as in the Bible tapuakh
plain and simple, means “apple.” But in
The tale of
words and their metamorphoses is complex and interesting and requires far more
than a brief essay for adequate presentation.
However, the present account may serve to illustrate the appropriateness
of Job’s ancient dictum “Doth not the ear try words?” (Job
[1] For more recent
publications and general bibliography see and E. Y. Kutscher, Words and Their History,
[2] The author obviously
meant that, for our purposes, we can look at Hebrew words under three heads or
the like. DS
[3] A calque is a compound,
derivative, or phrase that is introduced into a language through translation of
the constituents of a term in another language (as superman from German
Übermensch see further http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2001/v46/n3/004120ar.pdf
DS
[4] The author transliterates
the Hebrew words to reflect Modern Hebrew pronunciation. For transliteration,
as it appears here see DS
[6] Rabbinic=Mishnaic DS
[7] The Old Greek
translation of the Hebrew Bible. The
oldest existing translation and probably the first ever made DS
[9] There is no Biblical
Hebrew word for conscience. The closest to it is the word for ‘heart’ see. DS
[10] Equivalent to yen i.e., the diphthong had contracted
DS
[11] of the Hebrew Bible DS
[12] i.e., Biblical Israel
DS
[13] see also Comparative
Philology and the Text of the Old Testament by James
Barr,