[Avodah] Names In Different Languages; Exceptions Don't Prove Rules

[Jay F. Shachter]

Centuries ago, Nostradamus predicted that avodah-request at lists.aishdas.org would write on Tue Oct 28 23:05:26 2025:

> 
> In my learning of On[q]elos, I have noticed that it is not unusual
> for a place to have one name in Hebrew, and a seemingly unrelated
> name in Aramaic....
>
> I began to wonder if this also happens with names of *people*....
>
> I do not recall seeing any examples of such people.  But then I
> realized that this too is universal. The world accepts the idea of
> different names for places, but people don't seem to accept anything
> beyond minor pronunciation adaptations.
>

Moshe ben Maimon is usually called "Rambam" by Jews, and usually
called "Maimonides" by non-Jews.

I think the controlling factor is from whom you learned the name, and
I think that this factor controls all names; proper nouns are just a
special case of the more general phenomenon.  The English words for
sushi and kimono are sushi and kimono, because English-speaking people
first learned of sushi and kimonos from people who called them sushi
and kimonos.  In contrast, in seems that the English-speaking people
of North America who first encountered caribou did not know what
reindeer were, or if they had heard of reindeer they did not know that
they were looking at them, otherwise they would have called them
reindeer, and not caribou.  That's how language works.  Words do
change, gradually, over time, but people don't completely change the
name of a thing for which they already have a familiar, well-known
name.  That's how we know that gematria is not mid'oraitha.  If
gematriya was from Sinai, there would be a Hebrew word for it.  We
call gematria gematria because we learned of it from people who called
it gematria.  The non-Jews who call Rambam Maimonides do so because
they learned of him from people who called him Maimonides.  We call
Abraham ibn Ezra Abraham ibn Ezra because that was the name he used in
his commentaries and piyyutim; his non-Jewish contemporaries who knew
him only for his drinking songs and love poems probably called him by
his Arabic name.  The same is probably true of the non-Jews who knew
of Shmuel HaNagid only as Isma`il ibn Naghrilla, and who knew of Yosef
only as Tzafnath Pa`aneax.


> 
> .... yesterday I came across an anomaly which might count as "the
> exception that proves the rule."
>

Exceptions don't prove rules.  Exceptions disprove rules.  The
expression "the exception that proves the rule" comes from the
principle of legal construction that the existence of an exception
proves the existence of a rule.  Thus, when we see in halakha that
everyone must light Xannukka lights, and everyone must drink four cups
of wine on Passover, even if it must be paid for by charity, we learn
the existence of the rule that one is forbidden to ask for charity to
pay for any other mitzvah, like waving the arba`ah minim, or getting
married, or learning Torah, because otherwise there would be no need
to state that Xannukka lights and four cups of wine are an exception.
The "exception" in the phrase "the exception that proves the rule"
denotes an exception stated in the law, to a rule of law, which is
proven to exist, from the existence of the stated exception; it does
not denote an exception in fact, to a rule of fact.


               Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
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               When Martin Buber was a schoolboy, it must have been
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