[Avodah] Choshen

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:09:27AM -0400, T613K at aol.com wrote:
: Three examples of Rashi assuming certain words to have come from other  
: languages (or to be cognate to words in other languages) come to  mind:

Definitely not "come from other languages"! Rashi on Bereishis 1:11
reads "'Safah achas' - leshon haqodesh."

Clearly Rashi felt the bilbul leshonos was incomplete, leaving traces
of similarities in some words from the original leshon haqodesh.

: 1. Bereishis 41:43   re Yosef, "Vayikra'u lefanav Avrech."   Rashi on the 
: word "Avrech" quotes Targum, making it two words, Av Rech -- Father  (or Advisor) 
: of the King.  Rashi goes on to say that in Aramaic (some texts  have 
: "beloshon Romi" i.e., in Latin) the word "Rech" means king. Cf the
: word "Rex" which is "king" in Latin.

"Belashon Romi" is far more likely. If Rashi confused the Latin "x"
(which started out as a digraph for "cs") with the Greek "xi", he would
think it makes a khaf sound. OTOH, in Aramaic, "rakh" is as in "rakh
hanimol", not royalty.

: 2. Devarim 6:8 "Vehayu letotafos bein einecha" -- Rashi says that they're  
: called totafos because there are four parshios, and "Tat" beKaspi shetayim,  
: "Pas" beAfriki shetayim -- i.e, Tat is "two" in the Caspian language and Pas
: is  "two" in the African language, and two plus two makes four.

This is a gemara (Sanhedrin 4b). It doesn't start with Rashi.

There are two "Caspian languages". In both Kazakh and Kirghiz, the
languages called "Caspian" today, the word for two is "eki". (Both
similar to the Turkic "iki".) Nothing like "tat", making it unlikely
to be a reference to any language from that family. In Georgian (where
there is a region called Caspi), it's "iri".

"Africi" isn't African, it's Carthagian in particular -- the area the
Romans called "Africa". Phoenicians. Canaanites. A language likely to
be influenced by LhQ.

I wouldn't be surprised if "Caspi" is also something semitic, thus
justifying Chazal's assumption that it has similarities to Hebrew. Maybe
some prople south of the Caspian Sea.

: 3. Devarim 3:9 (not as good an example, because here the pasuk itself  /says/ 
: that it's not a Hebrew word): "Tzidonim yikra'u leChermon 'Sirion'  
: veha'Emori yikra'u lo 'Senir'" where Rashi says that the Emori called Mt. Chermon by
: the name "Senir" because it has snow on it and "Senir hu  sheleg beloshon 
: Ashkenaz" i.e., Senir is snow in German.  (ArtScroll  has a note that in modern 
: German the word for snow is "schnee" but that old  German may have had an "r" at 
: the end of the word.)

He also mentions "the language of Canaan". Philologos
<http://www.forward.com/articles/5583/> suggests that because of Yosifon,
Rashi probably believed that the Slavs descended from the *slaves* of
Canaan -- and thus related to the Emori. And in Russian and Ukrainian,
the word is "sner" and "snir", respectively.

-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "'When Adar enters, we increase our joy'
micha at aishdas.org         'Joy is nothing but Torah.'
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