[Avodah] Plurals

[Jay F Shachter]

In an article that was dated Wednesday, March 11, 2009 1:33 PM, and
which appeared in the Avodah Digest, Volume 26, Issue 49,
dbnet at zahav.net.il (D&E-H Bannett) made the following remark:

> 
> While in y'kum purkan we still say a prayer for the reish galuta in
> Bavel, the sefaradim don't.
>

In fact, we do not say a prayer for the Reish Galutha; we say a prayer
for the Reishei Galvatha.

Unless your mouth is not connected to your brain when you pray in
synagog, you cannot possibly recite the first Y'qum Purqan on Saturday
morning without being puzzled by this term.  If the plural in Hebrew
of "beith sefer" is "battei sefer", and not "battei sfarim", then why,
in Aramaic (which inflects like Hebrew in this regard), do we say
"reishei galvatha" and not "reishei galutha"?  What are the plural
Exiles over which the Exilarchs presided?  We do not say that one
Reish Galutha presided over, e.g., Galuth Mitzrayyim, while another
Reish Galutha presided over, e.g., Galuth Bavel -- so why do we say
"Reishei Galvatha"?

The only other example I can think of, of a phrase inflecting
similarly -- and it is a poor example -- is "talmid xakham", which
pluralizes as "talmidei xakhamim" rather than "talmidei xakham".  This
is a poor example, though, and there are two possible reasons why.
One of the reasons why it is a poor example is that the plural is
semantically correct.  One scholar may be a student of a single sage,
exclusively, but if you have a whole bunch of scholars, they are
likely students of a whole bunch of different sages, not all students
of the same sage (for the same reason, "reishei mthivatha" is
semantically correct: one head of an academy, but many heads of many
academies).  In contrast, "reishei galvatha" is not semantically
correct: there were many Exilarchs, but there was only one Exile over
which they were arching.

Another possible reason, and a far more interesting one, for the
abnormal plural "talmidei xakhamim", is that the singular form "talmid
xakham" was originally meant to be a noun followed by an adjective,
and the plural form, two nouns in smikhut, is an example of suppletion.

Suppletion occurs when the declension, or conjugation, or inflection
of a word involves the fusion of two or more inflected forms, like a
chimeric twin.  You find it, e.g., in Russian, in polite speech, when
one says, "ya yem", but "vi kushayetye".  Another example is found in
the Israeli language, in which the future tense of "amar" is
disappearing, and is being replaced by the future tense of "higgid",
while the past tense of "higgid" is disappearing, and is being
replaced by the past tense of "amar".

English has separate and unrelated masculine and feminine forms of
certain adjectives: men are handsome, and women are beautiful; men are
assertive, and women are obnoxious.  In some linguistic communities,
the standard word for a male convert to Judaism is the Hebrew word
"ger", while the standard word for a female convert to Judaism is the
Aramaic word "giyyoreth"; the Hebrew "gerah" and the Aramaic "gyor"
are not used.

If the pluralization of "talmid xakham" is an example of suppletion,
the one should be able to find other examples, in Hebrew, of
suppletion in the pluralization of nouns.  One example which occurs in
dialectical Hebrew is the word "shaliax", which means an agent, or
emissary.  The word has a standard plural, "shlixim", which inflects
according to the standard rules of Hebrew grammar, and a Lubavitcher
plural, "shluxim".  The Lubavitcher plural "shluxim", however, does
not derive from the noun "shaliax" at all, but, rather, from
"shaluax", the passive participle, although a Lubavitcher never uses
the word "shaluax" in the singular.

Suppletion is not complete until the speakers of the language cease to
be aware of any differences in meaning between the fused forms, and
this probably cannot happen in a language until the excluded forms are
completely lost.  Thus, Russians are still able to say "vi yeditye" on
the rare occasions when that is what they want to say.  A better
example of suppletion is the conjugation of the English word "to be",
which includes the forms "I am", "you are", and "he was".  The words
"be", "am", "are", and "was" are derived from four different
Indo-European roots, but speakers of English are not aware of any
difference in meaning among those four words.

If "talmid xakham" was originally meant to be a noun followed by an
adjective, than pluralizing it as "talmidei xakhamim", a noun followed
by a noun, does not provide a model for the Aramaic plural "reishei
galvatha", since "reish galutha", the singular, is clearly a noun
followed by a noun, not a noun followed by an adjective.  And if there
is any semantic reason why "reish galutha" should be pluralized as
"reishei galvatha", the reason escapes me.


			Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
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