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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in israeli-palestinian conflict

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Israeli strikes hit Gaza tunnels as diplomats work for truce

 

O, those bloody Abraham religions.

In Hebrew, the West Bank town known in English as Bethlehem is pronounced beit-LEKH-em, and means “House of Bread.” In Arabic, it is pronounced beit-LAH-m, and means “House of Meat.”

(I'm using H here to represent an emphatic H sound—essentially, H as in English, but pronounced more forcefully, with a puff of air from the throat. Of this sound, more later.)

How did the same cognate Semitic word gain such divergent meanings as “bread” and “meat”? Curiously, the same root turns up in the Hebrew word for “war,” milHamá.

4000 years ago, in Common Semitic—the Mother language ancestral to both Arabic and Hebrew—the verb laHama meant “slaughter.” To get meat, of course, you slaughter an animal. In war, by extension, human beings slaughter one another. In a pastoral society, “meat” becomes, pars pro toto, a stand-in for “food” generally, as in the archaic English phrase “meat and drink." When that pastoral society becomes, however, an agricultural one in which bread rather than meat is the staple food, it's easy to see how the old word for “meat” would come to mean “bread” instead.

House of Bread. House of Meat. House of Slaughter.

 

If you listen closely to reports on the current mess in Gaza—one wonders what, in retrospect, this war between Hamas and the state of Israel will be called—you'll hear the importance of that bloody emphatic H that I spoke of above.

In addition to being the name of the political party cum terrorist organization that misruns Gaza, hamas as a common noun means “zeal” in Arabic. In Levantine—Palestinian—Arabic, the word is pronounced Ha-MASS, with that emphatic H, and both As as in “dad.”

In Hebrew, the word is pronounced kha-MAS, with the Kh as in Bach or och, and the As as in “ah.” Coincidentally, but tellingly, as a common Hebrew noun, hamas means “violence.”

So, listening to the news, you can tell which side someone is on by how they pronounce “Hamas.”

Intentionally mispronouncing someone's name is an insult pretty much anywhere. I have to imagine that, to Arabic-speakers, the Israeli pronunciation of Hamas sounds like an insult.

I expect that, in many cases, the insult is probably intended.

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Pagan News Beagle: Faithful Friday, October 23

Jews struggle to coexist with Arabs in Israel and Palestine. The Parliament of World Religions is assessed. And the differing leadership style of Pope Francis and King Salman are analyzed. It's Faithful Friday, our weekly take on faiths and religious communities from around the world! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

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