[Mesorah] Another one

[Mandel, Seth]

The denizens of this site might recall me griping a while ago about the word אבוקה. The word appears in L'shon Chazal, never in the T'NaKh, and has no source.  There is no root in Semitic languages that adequately explains it, nor is there a source in Greek or Latin, and it does not appear in any Aramaic dialect we know of.

But don't think that is the only one where we can flaunt our ignorance.  There are a whole number of words that do not exist in the Bible and are common in L'shon Chazal that do not have any source that we know of. Yet words must have a source, or else no one could start using them: his interlocutor would not understand.  It can be slang, affected pronuciation, or a loan word from some language they both speak, but there must be a source.

So let me add now a root that occurred multiple times in the Targum of last week's haftoro read by the Teimanim: פרנס

The word is also very common in L'shon Chazal, and even appears in Bentshing and in Nishmas kol Hai, and in some other places according to local nusach, in verbal form.  As a noun, parnos, it is common in L'shon Chazal, but is not used in Modern Spoken Israeli Hebrew, and so many people do not understand exactly what the noun means (a term like overseer/administrator is the closest I can come up with, but its many occurrences make its meaning clear.)

At least this one occurs in Aramaic (or, rather, later Aramaic), unlike my friend avuqah.  But it has no known source in Hebrew or Aramaic.  The best guess I have seen would have it coming from the Latin pensium, but there is no direct way to get from that Latin to a root p-r-n-s.  And yet it is so common in L'shon Chazal and in Later Aramaic (including Syriac) that it must have a source, it is not as if it occurs only once or twice and could be scribal error.

I am almost at the point of positing another language that was spoken in Syria and EY in the time of Chazal (besides Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and assorted dialects like Phoenician.  But there is not record of such a thing, nor do Philo or Josephus show evidence of such a thing.

So here I am griping again, because when I daven and bentsh on Yontev I roll the words around in my mouth, savoring the taste of each and thinking of whence it came and whither it goeth.


Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel

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