[Avodah] Plurals

[Yitzhak Grossman]

On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:15:09 -0500
"Jay F Shachter" <jay at m5.chicago.il.us> wrote:

...

> 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

...

> 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.

What about batei kenesiyos and batei medrashos?  I suppose that they
are also semantically correct, since there are multiple kenesiyos and
medrashos.

Yitzhak
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