Philologos
By Philologos
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News Oaks or Terebinths?
Forward reader Bill Morris writes: “While perusing last week’s Torah reading in my ‘Etz Hayim’ (Jewish Publication Society, 1985) translation, I was struck by the phrase in its opening verse (Genesis 18:1) about God appearing to Abraham by ‘the terebinths of Mamre.’ Although the word ‘terebinth’ doesn’t flow easily off the tongue, it is mellifluous…
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Culture When Coinages Don’t Take
New York resident Gil Kulick writes to ask why, despite the great efforts made to find modern Hebrew equivalents for common words that did not exist in premodern Hebrew, Israeli Hebrew still uses foreign borrowings for such basic terms as bank, student, muzika, universita and historiya. “Or,” Mr. Kulick asks, “did the creators of modern…
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News Frontier Fighters
When Israeli sergeant Ben Kubani was killed in action on October 17 on the outskirts of the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, the men responsible for his death came from a Hamas militia known as el-murabitun. This is Arabic for “the frontier fighters” — unless, that is, one is discussing medieval…
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Culture Swedish Wish
Reader Debbie Rabina writes: “We have just returned from a family vacation in Sweden, where we spent some enjoyable time in the old city of Stockholm — Gamla Stan. The name immediately brings to mind the site of Gamla on the Golan Heights, and I am curious as to a possible connection between these two…
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Culture The Absence of ‘Eviction’
The other day I was having an English conversation with an Israeli acquaintance, an observant Jew of American origins, when he casually said, while trying to date something that had happened in his private life some two years ago, “I’m quite sure it was before the expulsion.” For a second, I didn’t know what he…
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Culture Divine Name
In the opening of the book of Genesis, with which we again begin the annual cycle of Torah readings this week, there are, as most reader have noticed, two different versions of Creation. In the first version, Chapter One’s, God creates the world in six days, all plant life on the fourth and human beings,…
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Culture One Bagel, Two Bagel?
Rashi Fein from Boston writes: “For some years I have had a dispute with a dear friend. I say that the plural of bagel is bagel. He says that the plural of bagel is bagels. I explain my position by arguing that bagel is a Yiddish word and that ‘two bagels’ in Yiddish would be…
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Culture At-one-ment
‘Atonement” is an English word to which I had never given much thought. In fact, I had thought about it so little that I had always assumed that the possibility of reading it as “at-one-ment” was merely a kind of pun having nothing to do with its original meaning. It’s embarrassing to find out, therefore,…
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