From: user5108@newsgrouper.org.invalid
DDeden posted:
English & Hebrew "cognates", Pseudo-etymology
by Josef Mitterer at Quora
Q: What are some English words that came from Hebrew? I heard examples, like
‘Child’ comes from the word ילד (Yeled) in Hebrew and ‘Eye’ from
עין (ayin).
A: If I remember right, Arnold Wadler mentions these “examples” in
his pseudo-etimological book Der Turm von Babel (‘The Tower of Babel’,
I don't know if the book has been translated into English).
It is a good example of how pseudo-etymologists claim linguistic relatedness
on the basis of superficial “similarities” without considering even
minimally sound laws or chronology. In most cases, like Wadler’s, they
aren’t genuinely interested
in actual etymology and thus do not conduct an open-ended investigation into
the word’s history, but they begin with their religious or political beliefs
and ideologies and attempt to “prove” them using completely unscientific
and dishonest “
methods”.
Let’s go back to Old English:
[…] oððe eagena bearhtm
forsiteð ond forsworceð […]
(Beowulf, 1766 s.)
In modern English it reads: ‘or the brightness of the eyes fades and
darkens’. The form eagena is the genitive plural of eage, from which the
Modern-English word eye is derived. Now, if the word eye really came from
Hebrew, wouldn't one
expect it to “resemble” its Hebrew “etymon” more closely the further
back in time one goes? Yet nobody would find it “intuitive” to
consider eage a cognate of ayin —and “intuition” is all these
pseudo-etymologists aim to— nor is
it phonetically plausible.
So, in order to answer the first question, I suppose that the vast majority of
English words coming from Hebrew have some religious meaning or are related to
Judaism; you won’t find them among the basic vocabulary.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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