Hi!

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... A note
>> on my site notes that Barak means "Lightning" in Semitic. Remember
>> Hannibal Barca ("Grace of the Lord of Lightning"), who took elephants
>> across the Alps to attack the Romans during the Punic Wars?
>
> Hmm. I thought of "Barack" as cognate to Hebrew "baruch", or more
> precisely to a form of the H. root B-R-K 'bless', which is in the word
> & name "Baruch" 'blessed'.

Yep. There are two different Semitic roots: "Barack" (as in Obama) and
"baruch" derive from B-R-K 'bless', while "Barak" (as in Ehud) and
"Barca" derive from B-R-Q 'lightning'. For more on this, see my two
Language Log posts:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004187.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004196.html


--Ben Zimmer

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