Philologos
By Philologos
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News Roots of ‘Religion’
Brad Rappaport from Brooklyn writes: “Recently, I read in my dictionary that the origin of the word ‘religion’ lies in the Latin word ligare, to bind. I found this interesting, not only because of the tradition of laying tefillin, but also because of the story of the binding of Isaac. Could it be, I reasoned,…
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News Back to the Land
Referring to my column of two weeks ago on the expression am ha’aretz, Jonathan Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, writes that “too much attention to the word am-ha’aretz seems to have badly affected your grammatical sense. As you surely know, the Hebrew plural of am-ha’aretz…
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News Ladino’s Hebrew Dearth
David Pollack writes: “My girlfriend’s grandmother spoke Ladino. Her family was originally from Spain and moved to Greece following the Spanish expulsion of 1492. What features of Hebrew does Ladino have? Is it like Yiddish, where most of the vocabulary is from the surrounding gentile language with Hebrew making up a smaller percentage of the…
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News How the Earthy Have Fallen
Diana Muir Appelbaum writes about the word am-ha’aretz, the “people of the land,” a biblical term commonly translated as “boor” or “ignoramus” when it occurs in Yiddish or in modern Hebrew: “How did the am-ha’aretz lose their stature? The group known by that name that emerges to put Josaiah on the throne in the Book…
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News Drinking and Writing
In a column two weeks ago titled “Dispatches From the Great Vodka War,” veteran New York Times journalist Serge Schmemann, a fancier of the drink, had a paragraph discussing some words for it. “Vodka,” he wrote there, “is a Russian word, a diminutive of ‘water’… The Poles may put ‘vodka’ on their bottles, but among…
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News The Sikrikin Mystery
Terror is stalking the streets of Jerusalem. It’s not the Palestinian brand. It’s the work of ultra-Orthodox extremists who have been, according to recent reports in the media, using and threatening violence against other ultra-Orthodox Jews whose religious observance strikes them as too lax. Known in Jerusalem’s Haredi community as “the sikrikin,” they recently burned…
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News An Ancient Shibboleth
Sam Sherman of Voorhees, N.J., has an interesting question. It has to do with a story in the 12th chapter of the Book of Judges about a battle between the Gileadites, who lived to the east of the Jordan River, and the Ephraimites, who lived to the west of it. When the Ephraimites were defeated,…
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News Forverts!
For this week’s anniversary issue, I’ve been asked by the editors of the Forward to write about how the paper got its name. This is in some ways easy to do and in some ways not. What gave the Forward’s founder, Abraham Cahan, the idea of calling his new Yiddish paper Forverts when it first…
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