Is there a default or standard set of meanings of the Hebrew alphabet? The first four are usually given as ox, house, camel, door, although sometimes “tent” is given instead of “house”. But the rest seem to have all kinds of variations, based on various webpages out there.
So is there a standard list that everyone learns or is it just a mess?
yeah but in an ancient nomadic tribe what’s the difference between house and tent
Hm, interesting, so “Beth Shalom” (the name of a synagogue near where I used to live) would be “House of Peace”? That makes sense.
That’s correct. The letters are aleph “ox”, beth “house”, gimel “camel”, beth “house”, heh “hey!” (no Hebrew nouns start with H, so a picture of a waving man was used), waw “hook”, zayin “spear”, cheth “fence”, teth “winding”, yod “hand”, kaph “sole” (of the foot; occasionally also palm of the hand), lamed “walking stick”, mem “water”, nun “species of fish?” (the origin of this one is uncertain), samekh “tasty-fish” (for this one we do know that the reference is to a kind of fish and that it is named from the root “to enjoy” but we are not certain of the species), 'ayin “eye”, peh “mouth”, tzade “side”, qoph “braid” (source of “coif”, a borrowing from Semitic into European languages), resh “head”, shin “tooth”, tav “mark”.
Close: “house” is “Bayit”; “Bet” (or “Beth”) is “house of”.
Bear in mind that modern Hebrew has drifted away from some of these meanings. While “Vav” is still “hook”, and “Ayin” is still “eye”, “door” is now “Delet” instead of “Dalet”, “water” is now “Mayim” instead of “Mem”, “hand” is now “Yad” instead of “Yod”, and so on, with the meanings of some letters now being completely archaic (“Chet” for “fence”, for instance).
Incidentally, the word “Zayin”, which once meant spear, is now used almost solely as a slang term for “penis”.
I was thinking this. In Modern English we have this distinction because the difference is important to our culture. Korean and Japanese have separate words for “big sister” and “little sister”, because age is historically more important to family dynamics there.
Bear in mind that Hebrew, or a language very much like it, was spoken by a large number of nations along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. This includes the Phoenicians, who were definitely not a nomadic tribe.
Also, Hebrew has a separate word for tent (“Ohel”) has well as for shack (“Sukkah”).
None of the words were “Hebrew” exactly; they were in whatever dialect was being spoken in the Sinai ~1500 BC, which would be a Semitic language of the same subgroup as, but not exactly the same as, Hebrew or Canaanite or Phoenician.
You’re kidding, right? :dubious:
הלכה Halakhah
הר har ‘mountain’
הלצה halatsah ‘joke’
Need I go on?
This “Beth” or “Bet” construct, meaning “House of” is quite popular in naming of Jewish synagogues, certainly at least in the United States. In my larval days, the family belonged to Temple Beth Torah. You can find synagogues named Beth Chaverim or Beth Haverim (House of Friends – sounds like a blended Jewish/Quaker temple to me). There are many others.
Is the useful phrase לך תזדיין somehow derived from this? (Lech tizdayin – go fuck off; go fuck yourself).
Yep. “Lehizdayen” means to fuck, and the root of the word is “Zayin”, or dick.
Funnily enough, the adjective “Mezuyan” - or fucked - is still used in formal Hebrew in it’s more classic meaning as “armed” in such phrases as “Shod Mezuyan” (armed robbery) or “Kochot Mezuyanim” (armed forces), which can lead to much hilarity.
And then there’s the whole “Moonlight Children” (as Aviv Gefen’s fans are called) who grew up on “Dor Mezuyan” – which is definitely the Fucked Generation rather than the Armed Generation…
Unrelatedly, this made the (aborted) Microsoft Zune the object of much hilarity here (especially if pronounced “Ziun”, as many people inevitably did…)
Also, to whoever mentioned the “Beth” possibly meaning “Tent” – the word “Ohel” for tent (which starts with “Alef” in Hebrew) is the “A” to “bayit”-s “B” in the standard Hebrew Alphabet song (“Aleph ohel, beth ze bayit”) – a fact that was used to great effect by the local “Occupy” movement two summers ago; their slogan was “Beth ze Ohel” – or “B is a tent” instead of “B is a home”. Their point being that it was impossible for a young family to afford a roof over their heads. Maybe thiswas what you saw?
Isn’t this the so-obvious-it’s-not-even-witty comment in Israel that the world’s Zionists, pronounced correctly in English but not Hebrew, are dick people?
Finnegans Wake:
“It’s as semper as oxhousehumper”
LOL, that’s what I get for typing too fast: I meant to write “no convenient Hebrew nouns start with H” by which I was meaning to say, nothing that would lend itself to a simple picture-- although har “mountain” seems like it could have been readily usable, now that you point that one out; I wasn’t able to think of any good alternatives for them to have used, just abstract hard-to-picture things like your other examples (for those unfamiliar with Hebrew, halakhah is “the right way to go”, used religiously for “proper interpretation of the scriptural law”) and the inventor of the alphabet also was apparently stumped.
Do you mean God or BenYehudah?
This, along with the further developments to “go fuck yourself” etc., is a great example of how words can wander mightily from their original meanings. Originally it was part of an n/t pair, of which there a few cases in Semitic, with -n ending a masculine noun and -t a feminine: zayin “spear” with zayit “olive”. Why “spear” and “olive”? Because olive-wood is hard and durable, and favored for weapons. The zay- root appears to be a reflex of a very ancient element *suy- for things with distinctive taste, found in about as many language groups as things like *mama for “mother”; three different suffixed forms in Indo-European give us “salt”, “sour”, and “sweet” while a borrowing from Chinese, surprisingly similar to the Semitic, gives us “soy”.
What is particularly remarkable here is that while the meaning of the root has shifted radically from “strong taste” to “olive” to “weapon” to “penis” to “fuck”, the pronunciation has hardly shifted at all in many thousands of years.
Does anyone else think the alphabet could be the outline of a story?
There was a farmer plowing fields with an א ox. Looking at his ב tent, he saw a ג camel sticking its nose in the ד door. The farmer yelled ה “Hey!” as the camel was starting to pull up the tent ו pegs. The farmer grabbed a ז spear and drove it away, then built a ח fence around the tent to protect it, securing it with a ט coil of rope held in his י hand, and packed earth around the fence to hold it better by tamping with the כ sole of his foot. Then it was time for lunch, so he got his ל walking stick and hiked down to the מ water, which had various species of נ fish, and he fished until he caught a ס tastyfish. To get a drink, he then found a ע spring of water, so he put his פ mouth in it and drank. Then he went to get his צ fishhook to put it away, but a ק monkey came along and stole it. The farmer chased the monkey and hit it on the ר head, even though it bit him with its ש teeth, which left a ת mark.
Or if not, how to explain the order of letters, which otherwise follows no apparent logic?
It should probably be noted that the word Zain for Penis apparently does not stem from “Weapon”, but rather from the letter Zain itself.
I know of two etymology versions:
Yiddish speakers used to refer to penis as Swantz (Yiddish for “Tail”). This word got translated into Hebrew, as the same word – Zanav (Tail). Then, the word Zanav itself became “dirty”, so they used the first letter only (much like “the F word” for Fuck).
Early Hebrew speakers used the word Gezzer (Carrot) for penis. When that became “dirty”, they made a cyclic transform, and referred to Zerreg instead. And when THAT became “dirty”, again the first letter alone Zain was used.
Ironically, today the word Zerreg is sometimes used as a “clean” version for Zain.
