Again Anatoly Vorobey has an Avva post (in Russian) that tickles my linguistic fancy. It concerns the Hebrew word for ‘testicle,’ אשך, which according to Anatoly is pronounced a-SHAKH (אָשָׁךְ) by practically all speakers of Modern Hebrew but which all reference works claim is E-shekh (אֶשֶׁךְ), which is indeed given in my dictionaries and at Wiktionary. As he says, the origin is obvious: since the word is generally used in the plural, asha-KHIM (אֲשָׁכִים), the singular came to conform with it. He finishes his post thus:
Why there isn’t a single normal/decent Hebrew dictionary that describes the language the way people actually use it (I repeat once again – this isn’t about colloquialisms or slang! even in a “lofty” context, people only know and use the word ashakh!) remains a mystery to me. And that’s annoying.
It reminds me of my puzzlement as to why нарды (nardy), the normal Russian word for ‘backgammon,’ isn’t in the dictionaries.
Incidentally, the post is called “ашах! как много в этом слове” [ashakh! how much is in that word], a takeoff on a famous Pushkin passage (from Eugene Onegin) that goes “Москва… как много в этом звуке Для сердца русского слилось!” [Moscow… how much is blended in that sound for the heart of a Russian!].
Various Oti-Volta languages have paired-body-part words where the singular has been remodelled after the plural form too (“leg” in Agolle Kusaal, and “ear” in quite a number of languages. Not “testicle”, though.)
I don’t remember if I’ve heard the word pronounced (only beitsá, lit. ‘egg’), but this sounds right. eshekh sounds awfully correct to me (though I myself might use it, among other archaisms).
GoogTran also gives only E-shekh (אֶשֶׁךְ).
It’s really remarkable. How can an everyday pronunciation — not an “accepted alternative” or whatever, but the form almost everyone uses all the time — be completely ignored by all “authorities”?
@Y “I don’t remember if I’ve heard the word pronounced….”
What is your word or combination of words meaning ‘scrotum’? Is it not כיס האשכים
or שק האשכים
or both?
Hebrew WAry says, “the normative singular form is אֶשֶׁךְ (pronunciation: eshekh), but in the spoken language the form אָשָׁךְ (pronunciation: ashakh) is widespread. That form is considered non-normative.”
The relatively recent monolingual dictionary Rav-Milim purports to be a descriptive dictionary of Modern Hebrew. I haven’t checked it.
@M: I left Israel when I was pretty young, and I do have gaps in my vocabulary. I might not have heard the word for ‘scrotum’ spoken, though I have heard ashakhím. In any case, that doesn’t help with the singular form.
I think I vaguely remember now hearing or reading some pun with ashakh. It’ll come to me.
Ed.: It just did. It was written in some wise-ass humor publication. Not spoken.
Same phenomenon happened in חרק/חרקים xereq/xaraqim ‘insect(s)’, pronounced xaraq by most. Probably a little less ignored by authorities, but maybe just because it’s more common to discuss a single insect.
xereq/xaraqim
In Arabic, “fly” (the insect) is singulative ذبابة dhubābah, with plurals including ذبّان dhibbān “flies”, and a collective form ذباب dhubāb “flies (en masse)”. In Algerian Arabic (and probably elsewhere, can’t be bothered to check), ذبّان dhebbān has been reinterpreted as the collective, replacing the old singulative with the new form ذبّانة dhebbāna. I imagine such plural to singular back formations are not unusual for insects that usually get noticed in swarms.
I can’t derive singulars from Russian collectives that refer to insects.
I do it with plants.
I don’t know why. I think of a (hypothetical) reason why it won’t work or sound awkward for one such collective and then I think of two other examples and hypothesise two more different reasons:)
To everyone’s surprise I find myself in disagreement with the host.
It’s not necessarily ‘remarkable’ that dictionaries don’t include certain ungrammatical forms notwithstanding the commonality of their usage. The job of responsible lexicographers is to educate the community in proper usage and not to perpetuate popular misunderstandings. The descriptivist mentality hasn’t completely dominated everywhere.
In Greek a- / an- are negation suffixes e.g. atheist (a-theist), anonymous (an-onymous). In modern Greek the two forms ανέμελος (care-free, insouciant) and ανεπρόκοπος (good-for-nothing, useless person) are extremely common in usage but ungrammatical because they originated in the misunderstanding of -ανε- as a negation suffix based on other forms such as αν-έξοδος (free of charge, cheap). The correct forms are hence άμελος and απρόκοπος.
In the recent past the illiterate used many more -ανε- words e.g. ανέμυαλος (brainless) but thanks to the counsels of responsible linguists these have been eliminated and today everyone uses the correct άμυαλος. Needless to say, ungrammatical -ανε- words were treated like linguistic refuse and no responsible dictionary dared include them. This changed only when brainless demoticism took over in the 80s which is the reason why those two forms still survive.
True: there are still prescriptivist dictionaries, and there are dictionaries that *coughdudencough* aren’t sure what they want to be and leave everyone as confused as they are.
But if you encounter a WRONG WRONG WRONG form that you didn’t know, you should be able to look it up and learn what it means, even if the dictionary entry contains a big flashing marker that says it’s WRONG WRONG WRONG. Pretending that a WRONG WRONG WRONG form doesn’t even exist seems counterproductive to me – counterproductive to the goals of a prescriptivist dictionary.
I’m belatedly wondering why the Hebrew word for “testis” gets a regular plural suffix, not an originally dual suffix like so many other paired boy parts. (Typo left in.)
But if you encounter a WRONG WRONG WRONG form that you didn’t know, you should be able to look it up and learn what it means, even if the dictionary entry contains a big flashing marker that says it’s WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Wiktionary even has entries for some common misspellings (labeled as such), for what seems to be pretty much this reason.
Pretending that a WRONG WRONG WRONG form doesn’t even exist seems counterproductive to me
Some of the earliest information on spoken Arabic comes from a minor medieval genre called Laḥn al-`āmmah, roughly “popular solecisms”, which list common nonstandard usages of their time and tell people what they should say instead. Pedagogically, that’s a very ill-advised approach; but later linguists can only be grateful for it.
Hebrew WAry says, “the normative singular form is אֶשֶׁךְ (pronunciation: eshekh), but in the spoken language the form אָשָׁךְ (pronunciation: ashakh) is widespread. That form is considered non-normative.”
Thanks, I feel better now!
To everyone’s surprise I find myself in disagreement with the host.
That’s because, as usual, you have strong opinions not based on fact.
Just like the Appendix Probi, an important source for “vulgar” Latin.
Along those lines, I recently discovered an entertaining work from 1808 titled _IMPROPRIETIES in PRONUNCIATION_, common among the people of New-England, bound up as an appendix with spelling-book for schoolchildren.* This is of course valuable evidence of pronunciation variation, with some of the deprecated variants remaining common at least in in-print rustic dialect into my own lifetime (e.g. chimbly for chimney or widder for widow) but there are others like quine for coin or ginshang for ginseng that are new ones on me. It also covers objections that in my mind go beyond pronunciation as such to nonstandard conjugation (drownded for drowned), excessively informal synonyms (gal for girl, sentry for sentinel, not to mention a well-known slur characterized as a mispronunciation of negro), and unauthorized clippings (groom for bridegroom).
*The compiler of the list of Wrong Wrong Wrong pronunciations looks to have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_Bingham
@jwb
“While in Canaan with the spies, Caleb’s voice was so loud that he succeeded in saving the other spies by frightening giants away from them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb
I suppose this is behind my feeling that this name is not one of the better Bible names to use for offspring. However, I know an Onan, which is arguably a worse name.
Why on earth would you call a kid Onan??
@David M.
Yes, which is why ancient lexicographers, which were of course prescriptivists, didn’t use dictionaries at all as a means to educate their audience. They used the onomasticon format i.e. they presented compilations of words arranged thematically and explained them organically whereas dictionaries compile words and phrases alphabetically and explain mechanically. Since dictionaries see themselves as purely scientific works they have to pretend to be able to include every single utterance and phrase in a given language. In practice this doesn’t work very well, there’s always an element of subjectivity and incompleteness in dictionaries.
Onomastica are not purely scientific works but are rather scientific-literary hybrids which is why they can be pleasant to read if well-written, unlike dictionaries which are always the linguistic equivalent of telephone books. The fact that they feel as boring and lifeless as telephone books is why in practice dictionaries are just idle decor objects collecting dust on a shelf, they make no effective contribution to anyone’s language education. The dictionaries more likely to see prolonged study are those that occupy themselves with a particular semantic field only, closer to the spirit of ancient lexeis. A theoretical reinvigoration of prescriptivism would require the revival of onomastica and the eclipse of dictionaries.
Criticizing ancient and medieval compilations of proper usage as ‘pedagogically misguided’ is myopic because it misunderstands the intentions of their authors. They didn’t want to teach the masses how to speak, they just wanted to teach their socially ambitious clients how to speak in a higher register of their own language so that they would be taken seriously by those in power as cultured individuals. Language use is not really emphasized as a mark of culture today because modern society is democratic and at least in theory egalitarian. Even authoritarian societies like China pretend to follow egalitarian political ideals. This sort of pretension didn’t exist in the days of the Appendix Probi.
Wikit: The dual form is very rare and does not exist in modern Hebrew.
I, too, wondered about this, and I have come up with a solution to both problems, which I am sure will be happily accepted and become immediately popular, and will satisfy language purists and also everyone else.
Change the plural to a dual plural of eshkhayim. Since this rhymes with eynayim (eyes, dual plural), it will be easy to remember.
But that might make people think that the singular has the same vowel pattern as ayin. So ashikh?
Ugh. Well, you can’t win them all.
I think this came up the last time the Hebrew dual was discussed, but to repeat: Most body parts in Hebrew that exist in plural are marked feminine, but eshekh/ashakh is masculine as an exception. Gender essentialists will no doubt be happy about that.
@PlasticPad: “Caleb” has been one of the 100 most popular names in the U.S. for baby boys since year-of-birth 1989, although admittedly its current popularity came after a considerable lull. (E.g. it was not in the top 1000 for my own year-of-birth six decades ago.) There are lots of Old Testament names that had some vogue among 18th-century New Englanders that now seem odd and archaic in a U.S. context, but “Caleb” isn’t one of them.
The OT narrative includes the theme that the Hebrews had to wander so long in the wilderness (40 years) between leaving Egypt and entering the Promised Land because they’d been disobedient, and the length of the interim period meant that Moses himself and pretty much all of the men who’d been of military age at the time of the departure from Egypt had died off before the next generation finally entered the Promised Land, with Joshua and Caleb being the prominent exceptions to this general actuarial trend on account of they were apparently free of the general disobedience taint. So on balance Caleb is presented by the narrative as a positive role model, not that which OT personalities have names that are v. aren’t commonly given to babies in the U.S. necessarily follows some coherent theological model. I believe I had some New England ancestress (early 19th century) some distance up the family tree named Achsah, which is not a name that ever became particularly popular but is said by Scripture to have been that of Caleb’s daughter.
@Owlmirror:
This is evidently the key. The dual was avoided to escape the terrifying prospect of testicles being implied to be feminine.
Now I think of it, Welsh caill “testicle” actually is feminine. We Celtic men are secure in our masculinity.
There’s a character in Girl Genius named “Moloch von Zinzer”.
(His mother got his name from the bible, but hadn’t actually read it. “I had eight brothers. Nobody had time for stuff like that on the farm.”)
https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20120817
Be that as it may.
There are people not named Onan who really ought to be, because they are such goddamned pretentious wankers.
But more generally, the Binghams were and maybe still are a posh old New England family (when I was an Ivy League freshman 42 falls ago I had classmates with rooms in Bingham Hall …), and “Caleb” is an extremely unsurprising name for a Bingham born in the relevant century, just as “Hiram”* was an extremely unsurprising name for the generational-cohort-of-relevant-ethnic-and-social-class background for Hiram Bingham III (born 1875), who was variously the “rediscoverer” of Machu Picchu, a U.S. Senator, and the Governor of Connecticut (but only for one day).
*An Old Testament name (albeit not a Hebrew one), but one with a lot of Masonic baggage and thus more prominent in the age when certain posh WASPs cared more about Freemasonry than they did about Calvinism.
To make things worse, eshekh and ayin are, in fact, of the same template, and the vowel qualities only differ due to the root consonant classes.
@hat, dm
He is named in this report.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/coroner-s-court/cycle-lane-urged-after-cyclist-killed-in-collision-with-lorry-at-south-dublin-roundabout-1.3619225
I believe his parents chose the name like DM’s example, i.e., a Biblical name without detailed knowledge of the story concerning the Biblical figure.
Per the Hebrew Academy’s page, the dual appears in some pointed manuscripts of the Mishna, only as the possessive אֶשְׁכָּיו ʾeškāyw (I think that’s the right transliteration), with אשכיים appearing in some later sources. It is not in Ben Yehuda’s dictionary. The Hebrew Language Committee, predecessor of the Academy, preferred that dual form. The later Academy codified the plural. I have never seen the dual form used anywhere.
I also found here and there a very nice, BH-styled innovated word for ‘scrotum’, מַאֲשֵׁכָה, Masoretically maʾašēḵâ, Modernly ma’ashekhá, but alas, it has not gained any users or advocates.
I was saddened to read the unfortunate story in the link PlasticPaddy posted, but on a purely onomastic note I was struck by the name of the exonerated-from-wrongdoing lorry driver, who seems likely to have been a Romanian of Magyar ancestry like my one-time teacher (in a formal semantics class that I quite deservedly got an awful grade in) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donka_Farkas. EU membership has no doubt led to a more ethnically-diverse range of lorry drivers in Ireland than was previously the case.
shad ‘breast’ is masculine, because the One Grammatical Universal is that all rules have exceptions.
No, seriously – for teaching, it is best if only correct forms ever come up. If you have to learn wrong forms along with the (corresponding) right ones, you’re going to confuse them.
Caleb has, as noted, been a relatively common name for American boys for several decades now. I recall not encountering it, however, until third grade, not so many years before the name broke into the top 100. I confess that I thought it was a very ugly name at the time, although I couldn’t say why.
In Arabic, “fly” (the insect) is singulative ذبابة dhubābah, with plurals including ذبّان dhibbān “flies”, and a collective form ذباب dhubāb “flies (en masse)”. In Algerian Arabic (and probably elsewhere, can’t be bothered to check), ذبّان dhebbān has been reinterpreted as the collective, replacing the old singulative with the new form ذبّانة dhebbāna. I imagine such plural to singular back formations are not unusual for insects that usually get noticed in swarms.
Could dhubābah itself derive from an ancient plural (hinted at by the reduplication), which was later reinterpreted as a singular? Or is that an actual singulative, derived from **dhub or such?
The Hebrew cognate is reduplicated in the singular, zĕḇûḇ.
@jwb
Anecdotally, a lot of European long-range professional drivers have roots in Eastern Europe or are even nominally based there, because their companies can pay them lower wages, and the work requires only the requisite driving license, i.e., no language proficiency. I don’t know how true this is, I do know that laws have been brought in to try and improve their working conditions and safety, i.e., I think lorries involved in haulage have to be fitted with devices that show speeds, distances and driving intervals (maybe the route can even be checked against the declared route using these devices).
@PP: I would have thought people didn’t drive long-haul lorries from Eastern Europe to Ireland and back because there is an inconveniently deep stretch of water not crossed by a bridge in between, but maybe I’m not allowing for the possibility of large trucks traveling by ferry with their Continental drivers coming along? (I had imagined Dublin-resident Romanian lorry drivers on the model of the stereotypical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_plumber.)
@jwb
Until recently, Britain was also Europe (and direct shipping from Britain to Ireland, including shipments originating in other EU countries and shipping via N.I, far outweighed direct shipping between other EU countries and Ireland. Since Brexit, this may have changed somewhat. I am not sure there is enough haulage work within Ireland to support a large number of non-Irish (or even Irish) hauliers.