[Avodah] Choshen

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 06:54:53AM -0700, Simon Montagu wrote:
:> You can't say that in the Caspian language they retained the original Hebrew
:> word for two, "tat," since tat is not the original Hebrew word for two! Nor
: > can you say that Africi retained a trace of Hebrew in its word for two,
: > since "pat" also is not the original Hebrew word for two. And "rech" is not
: > the original Hebrew word for king, so you can't find in Latin a trace of the
: > original Hebrew, either. (Not in the word avrech, anyway.)

: Maybe "tat" and "pat" were archaic pre-haflaga Hebrew words for "two"
: which were retained in other languages, and in "totafot"? Something
: like this can happen - for example the Classical Greek word for water
: is "hydor", which survives in English words like "hydraulic" and
: "hydrotherapy", but the Modern Greek for water is "nero".

It needn't fall out of Hebrew. One thing academia note and comment upon is
the amazingly small size of the vocabulary used in Tanakh. We know from
other ancient Hebrew texts (eg the Tel Amarnah letters), the language
actually had a far larger collection of roots that could have been used.

Why? Perhaps because the RBSO wanted the Torah to last, so He used roots
that would only appear once or twice only one necessary to make a point.
Their meanings are harder to preserve when the root doesn't appear in
many contexts. Or perhaps it's simply a formal style.

I took that gemara about Totafos along those lines. Not that the word fell
out of Hebrew, simply that it wasn't used in Tanakh.

In English, the concept of two-ness could be expressed by the word "two",
but also by "pair", or "couple", or as leveraging "di" (duo, dual) or "bi"
(bicycle) from earlier languages. If someone only knew a small subset of
English vocabulary, would he know that a "duet" is a pair or two singers?
The words don't resemble each other. However, someone who knows French
could deduce that "duet" is probably a pair in English. Or that "pair"
resembles the Spanish "par" (or Italian "paio", to some extent).

If English usually uses two, but can use "duet" or "pair", why not Hebrew
have "shtayim", but also "tat" and "pat"?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             You will never "find" time for anything.
micha at aishdas.org        If you want time, you must make it.
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