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Mar

Hebrew

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments

Categories: Language and Religion

It used to be that the essential components of a gentleman’s education included Latin, Greek and Hebrew. (Not so much attention was paid to a lady’s education.) While today Latin and Greek are still offered at many high schools and universities and are mandatory for secondary students in some European countries, it is difficult to take a Hebrew course outside of a synagogue or Jewish day school. But even if we never study Hebrew, it befits us to know more about a language that has helped shape the culture of the West.

One characteristic that distinguishes Hebrew from Latin and Greek is the language family to which it belongs. Latin and Greek are Indo-European languages, a group of languages that encompasses most of the tongues spoken in Europe – including English – as well as several in Western Asia and Northern India. Hebrew on the other hand is part of the Afroasiatic family of languages that as their name implies are native to Africa and Asia, to Northern Africa and Southwestern Asia more specifically. Hebrew can be narrowed down even further to a particular branch of the Afroasiatic family, the Semitic. The Semitic branch includes a number of living languages, like Arabic, Maltese, Aramaic and Ethiopia’s Amharic, as well as several extinct ones, such as Phoenician, Edomite and Moabite, the speakers of some of which are mentioned in the Old Testament (Ruth, for example, was a Moabite woman).

The first writing in Hebrew dates back to the eleventh century before Christ. Though the Hebrew script might strike most Westerners as undecipherable, it is actually based on the same alphabet, the Phoenician, that gave rise to the Latin alphabet. One difference between Hebrew and Latin script is that the former is read from right to left rather than from left to right.

Hebrew was at first spoken on a daily basis by the ancient Jews. After their exile in Babylonia in 600 BC, though, the Jews adopted Aramaic as their everyday means of communication. Hebrew was nevertheless still employed for religious and literary purposes, just as during the Middle Ages Latin was used in the Catholic Mass and in scientific treatises. For instance, while Jesus’ mother tongue was Aramaic (no, Jesus didn’t speak English), he most likely knew Hebrew as a ritual language.

As the Jews moved throughout Europe and other places during the Diaspora, they tended to take on the languages of the people – Russian, English, Spanish, etcetera – among whom they lived, all while retaining Hebrew for religious services and literature. At times the Jews modified these languages to create their own forms of speech. The best-known example of this is Yiddish. Yiddish is basically a variety of German but contains a substantial amount of Hebrew vocabulary and is even written with the Hebrew alphabet. This fusion can be illustrated in the Yiddish words for “dog.” Two such terms are used: “hunt” from the German “hund” (as in “Dachshund”) and “kelef” from the noun of the same meaning in Hebrew.

What, one might wonder, brought Hebrew back from the brink, so to speak, of being an almost purely ritualistic medium to become the mother tongue of over five million people? Though even in the nineteenth century there were attempts to revive it as a spoken language, the real boost occurred with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The promulgation of Hebrew acquired a nationalistic slant for many Jews: it was a language they could call their own. Undoubtedly Hebrew’s resurrection was aided by the fact that it had remained in use for religious ceremonies; for a considerable proportion of Jews it had never truly disappeared, which may explain why the revival of Hebrew succeeded while that of Gaelic in Ireland after that country’s independence from Britain did not. Hebrew is now the official language of Israel together with Arabic.

Finally, one might ask what has Hebrew contributed to English and other modern Western languages. At first glance, most English words of Hebrew origin tend to refer to Jewish objects or concepts, such as “menorah” or “mitzvah.” One Hebrew noun with an interesting history is “chutzpah.” While in Hebrew it originally meant “impudence,” in English “chutzpah” has taken on the positive connotation of “grit.” Some Hebrew words have ironically managed to make their way into Christian religious vocabulary. “Pesach” – Passover – becomes the Italian “Pasqua,” Spanish “Pascua,” French “Paques,” Swedish “Pask” and our own “paschal,” all signifying Easter, not a fortuitous transformation, as Jesus’ Last Supper was essentially a Passover meal. In a curious twist, “Pesach” has
ended up (through “Pascua”) in the Tagalog language of the Philippines as “Pasko,” meaning however not Easter but Christmas.

Hebrew’s principal contribution to the languages of the West lies in personal names that appear in the Bible. Though some of these names, such as Hannah or Moses, are primarily – though not exclusively – confined to the Jewish community, others, like John, James and David, have entered the mainstream with no Jewish ethnic connotation at all. Another mainstream name ultimately of Hebrew origin is my middle name and my mother’s first name, Elizabeth (“God is my oath”). The “El” signifies “God” and turns up as well in words like “Bethel” (“house of God”).

While a large percentage of names in most Christian majority nations are of Hebrew origin, they have nonetheless had their periods of boom and bust. Old Testament names, almost all of which are Hebrew, saw a surge in popularity after the Reformation and into the 19th century, when many Protestant families turned away from the Roman Catholic practice of calling children after saints with no connection to the Bible. Hence we have Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Protestants are not the only ones however to look to Hebrew nomenclature: Spanish-speaking countries have their fair share of boys with names like Efrain, Neftali and Abel.

Whatever its history and contribution to the West, Hebrew shows no sign of dying either in the synagogue or in the street.

Mar

Languages of the Bible

By Emilia Liz 3 Comments

Categories: History, Language and Religion

A few years ago a broadcaster from Alberta, Canada was asking members of the public their opinion on the nation’s bilingual policy. According to one woman, Canada did not need any such policy. If English was good enough for Jesus, she said, surely it was good enough for Canadians.

Of course I had a huge laugh over this. In Jesus’ time the languages spoken in what we now call England were Celtic; the ancestor of modern-day English was introduced several centuries later when the Germanic Angle and Saxon tribes invaded the island, giving rise to the term “Anglo-Saxon.” But the Alberta woman’s statement raises the question: what language did Christ actually speak?

One can be forgiven for thinking that Jesus’ mother tongue was Hebrew. After all, Hebrew, in which the Old Testament was written, is considered the language of the Jews, and Christ himself was a Jew. In his daily life, though, he conversed in Aramaic, a closely related language that the Jews adopted during their exile in Babylonia and that more recently was used in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. Some words of Aramaic origin in English include the name Thomas (meaning “twin”) and “abbot” from “abba,” a term for father. Jesus might have known Greek as well. At the time of the New Testament, Greek had become a “lingua franca” in the Mediterranean area, and as Jesus had dealings with non-Jews, he may very well have used Greek on these occasions. It is unlikely, however, that he spoke Latin, which was known by few in Palestine other than the Roman administrators.

As stated earlier, Aramaic and Hebrew are very similar. They both belong to a group of tongues known as the Semitic languages, some familiar examples of which are Arabic, Phoenician, and Ethiopia’s Amharic. The Semitic languages are in turn part of a larger group known as the Afroasiatic family, which includes a number of tongues spoken in the Middle East and North and East Africa.

Many Semitic languages in the Bible, however, are today either extinct or used only by small groups of individuals. To a large extent, these languages were pushed to, or over, the brink by their sister tongue Arabic, which expanded following the rise of Islam. Among the now-dead languages are Moabite, Edomite, and Ammonite, whose speakers are mentioned in various parts of the Old Testament. Ruth, to whom a book of the Bible is dedicated, was a Moabite woman. Aramaic is now spoken by about half a million people in Lebanon and Syria. Although it is under constant threat from the more dominant Arabic around it, efforts are being undertaken to preserve the language.

Not all the tongues in the Bible fall into the Semitic and Afroasiatic categories. Others belong to the Indo-European family, a group that encompasses most modern-day languages of Europe and several in Western Asia and Northern India. Greek and Latin are well-known examples of Indo-European languages that make their appearance in the New Testament, which in fact was originally written in Greek. The Persians, of whose empire the Biblical heroine Esther became queen, also spoke an Indo-European language.

A lesser-known Indo-European people described in the Bible were the Hittites. At one time rulers of a large empire in the Middle East, their most famous member was Uriah, an officer in the Israelite army whom David had killed after his (David’s) affair with the former’s wife Bathsheba. Unlike Persian, Greek, and Latin, though, which live on today in various forms – as Iranian, modern Greek, and the present-day Romance tongues respectively – the language of the Hittites died without leaving any descendants, so to speak.

The most extraordinary Biblical language concerns the Elamites, a people mentioned in Genesis and Acts of the Apostles. They originated from what is now Iran and later conquered Babylonia. Interestingly, their language belonged to a family known as Dravidian, the most familiar member of which (to Westerners at least) is Tamil. Though Dravidian languages are at present largely confined to Southern India and Sri Lanka, they were believed to have once been spoken over a much broader area, hence the presence of the Elamites in Biblical lands.

So if my friend from Alberta were to meet Jesus, she would be well advised to bring along a Greek or Aramaic interpreter!

Sep

A Dog’s World: The Word Behind Man’s Best Friend

By Emilia Liz 2 Comments

Categories: History and Language

Nowadays it seems there are as many if not more lists of dogs’ as of babies’ names. Few potential pet owners, however, show much interest in the name “dog” itself. Which is a pity, because this hoary old noun, to paraphrase The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt in an article about motherhood, has a history stretching back across time and place.

“Dog” hails from the Old English word “dogca,” which actually referred to a specific kind of dog, a mastiff. “Dogca” in this sense was borrowed by several other European languages. In French it became “dogue” as in the breed the dogue de Bordeaux, the best-known example of which is the character Hooch in the Tom Hanks movie Turner and Hooch. The previous term for dog in Old English was “hound.” Ironically, while “hound” eventually took on a more restricted meaning – that is, of a hunting dog – “dog” came to signify the animal in general.

“Hound” is noticeably similar to the word for dog in the other Germanic languages. These include the Dutch “hond” (as in the breed the Keeshond) and “hund” in German and the Scandinavian languages. More distantly, it is related to the Latin “canis,” which gave us “canine” and “kennel” among other words. Even the Ancient Greek name for dog, “kyon,” has left its mark on the English language. “Kyon”’s most famous contribution to our vocabulary is “cynic,” which originally meant “dog-like” – and which would therefore have made the phrase “Garfield the Cynical Cat” a literal oxymoron. The Greek philosopher Diogenes, founder of the school of thought known as Cynicism, was called “The Dog” during his lifetime. He was alleged to have stated: “I am Diogenes the Dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels.” Thus he and his followers were termed the Cynics, or dog-like ones.

Words for dog related – albeit more distantly – to “hound” can be found in other branches of the Indo-European language family.* Latvian has “suns,” Armenian “shun,” and even the classical Sanskrit of ancient India boasts “svan.” Linguists believe that the root word for “dog” in the original tongue spoken by the Indo-European people, who are believed to have lived in the Russian steppes 3,000 years before Christ, was something like “kwon.” The “k” then became an “h” in the Germanic languages and an “s” in Eastern Europe and some parts of Asia. The fact that such a wide range of languages use a derivative of “kwon” suggests that the earliest Indo-Europeans possessed domestic dogs, along with animals like cows, pigs, sheep and horses that also have similar names in these languages. On the other hand cats, who were only introduced to Europe in Greek and Roman times, lack an Indo-European root word; “cat” appears to be a borrowing from a Semitic language similar to the Arabic “qett.”

So the next time you pat your furry canine friend, think of the history behind his or her name!

* “Indo-European” refers to a group of languages spoken in most of Europe and a number of places in Western Asia and India. Well-known examples are English, Russian and Hindi.