[Avodah] Translating the word Inyan

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 12:05:04PM -0400, Zvi Lampel wrote:
: I've often been frustrated trying to translate the word "inyan" into 
: English. The usual translations, "matter" or "subject" or even 
: "concern" often sound stiff in English and do not get across the real 
: Hebrew meaning and feel...

I agree about feel/connotation, but I think "concern" accurately
reflects the Hebrew meaning. An inyan can be me'anyein, so the notion of
intellection interest appears to be relevent.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs "Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old
Testamant" puts inyan under the shoresh /ayin-nun-hei/ (translation II,
bottom pg 775 <http://books.google.com/books?id=u0ATAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA775>),
to be ocupied or busines with. They say it's a possible Armaic loan-word,
and I'm sure I I could read Syriac and Arabic, I'd be convinced. They
cite pesuqim (and Ben Sirach) as well. 

...
: PS: I'm using Ariel font and typing two single-quotation marks rather 
: than double-quotation marks, hoping they don't come across as question 
: marks. If they do, I would appreciate advice.

The font is irrelevent, since the digest is sent in plain text -- no font,
and the only formatting is spacing and carriage returns. The problem
with double quotes is that your emailer turns the vertical " into a true
open or close quote, which aren't in the standard text character set
(ASCII). If I ever figure out how to switch to cp1255 (a/k/a win-1255,
a/k/a enhanced iso8859-8) to take care of the Hebrew problem, the open
and close quotes are in that character set, and all would be well.

Now, the same could have been true of the vertical single quote ' --
that your emailer would have converted it to an open or close single
quote. It didn't, I can't explain why not.

In any case, in this reply I converted the pair of single quotes to
double quotes, as my emailer (mutt) is too stupid to do things to my
text that I don't explicitly ask it to do.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Today is the 37th day, which is
micha at aishdas.org        5 weeks and 2 days in/toward the omer.
http://www.aishdas.org   Gevurah sheb'Yesod: When does reliability
Fax: (270) 514-1507               require one to be strict with another?