[Avodah] T'hay

[Simon Montagu]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 5:23 AM, Akiva Miller via Avodah <
avodah at lists.aishdas.org> wrote:

> There is a word spelled tav-heh-aleph, pronounced "t'hay". Is this
> word Hebrew or Aramaic?
>

Hebrew. I believe the Aramaic equivalent would be tehevi.


>
> From context and sound, I have always presumed that it means something
> very similar to "yihyeh". Is that correct?
>
> If they are indeed similar in meaning, then I imgine that they is
> still some slight shade of difference. If they meant the exact same
> thing, wouldn't authors use the more common word (yihyeh) instead?
> This would be the case even if t'hay is Hebrew, and it would certainly
> be true if t'hay is Aramaic.
>
> The reason I'm asking these questions is because I have found a
> surprising number of paragraphs in my siddur, where all the words are
> obviously Hebrew, except for this one word. Including a foreign word
> in a text is not unheard of (there's a Latin word in Nachem, for
> example), but this is generally done because there is no native word
> with the precise meaning that the author is aiming for. And I can't
> imagine why "yihyeh" doesn't work in these cases:


(At any rate it would be "tihyeh" in the cases you quote, which are all in
the feminine)

In my siddur (Singer's) all the examples you give are "tehi" with a yud,
which is Biblical Hebrew, as in "Tehi ala benotenu" in last week's parasha
(Bereshit 26:28).

The difference between yihyeh/yehi and tihyeh/tehi is that the first is
future and the second is jussive (though the future can be used in a
jussive sense).

I assume the form with alef is Rabbinic Hebrew. How it comes to be used in
the siddur, or in which nushaot exactly, I don't know.
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