[Avodah] Legions

[jay via Avodah]

Yesterday I observed the fast of Av in a Sefardi synagog, for the
first time in my life, and I was surprised to hear the shliax tsibbur
say "ligyonim" during the repetition of the afternoon Amida.  I
checked the other Sefardi prayer books in the synagog, not just the
one used by the shliax tsibbur, and they all said ligyonim.  My own
prayer book, used by Ashkenazi xasidim, said "ligyonoth", as did the
one Lubavitcher prayer book in the synagog.  There were no authentic
Ashkenazi prayer books there but this morning I looked up an Ashkenazi
prayer book on-line and it also said ligyonoth.

How do you pluralize a Latin word in Hebrew?  If Hebrew were a
language like English, the foreign plural would be retained, which is
why we have graffiti and agenda, but in Hebrew foreign words always
inflect according to the rules of Hebrew (with rare and subtle
exceptions -- Hebrew words with five consonants, like sha`atnez and
tsfardea` and tarngol, are obviously of foreign origin, and tsfardea`
inflects peculiarly in Exodus: the first letter of the word, in all of
its forms, never takes a dagesh xazaq when preceded by the definite
article, which Ya`aqov Kamenetsky attributes to its foreign origin,
unfortunately he has no similarly satisfying explanation for leviim).

Hebrew words that end in -on are masculine in gender, and masculine
words usually form their plural by addin -im, but words that end in
-on form their plural by adding -oth as a rule, one says ra`ayonoth
and sh`onoth and xalonoth.  A native speaker of Hebrew, guided by his
language sense, would say ligyonoth without thinking; a non-native
speaker would consult the rule and say ligyonim.

What makes this interesting is that the conventional wisdom, at last
on this mailing list, is that Ashkenazim come from Israel (or, more
precisely, Palestine) and that Sefardim come from Babylon.  It seems
to me that you could get to Spain more easily from Israel than from
Babylon, and you wouldn't have to cross political boundaries, but
that's what people say.  We do know that our ancestors spoke Hebrew
much longer in Israel than they did in Babylon, until it was
supplanted by Aramaic, and even after it was, hillbillies and other
people lacking formal education, like Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi's
maidservant, continued to use Hebrew words here and there, just as the
English spoken in Texas by the common people has more Spanish in it
than the English spoken in New York, compare the language used in
O. Henry stories set in the two locations.  In the tiny difference, a
matter of two letters, in the pluralization of a foreign word, we have
additional evidence in support of the counterintuitive hypothesis
that Ashkenazim are from Palestine and Sefardim are from Babylon.


                        Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
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                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"