Elements, Elephants, etc.

[Stephen Goranson]

Admittedly, English words with Hebrew origins are not numerous--sack (bag) may
be one; perhaps sandal--but element and elephant may also be examples.

A recent news item reminded me of this. Some ealy Egyptian hieroglyph writing
apparently includes some early Hebrew. E.g. Jerusalem Post, "Deciphering of
earliest Semitic text reveals talk of snakes and spells [with
illustration]" (I
don't read old Egyptian, but the scholars involved are quite credible):

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467792041&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
or
http://tinyurl.com/2vkjua

Steiner's article in Hebrew includes (p.3) transcription in Latin letters:
http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/PDF/steiner.pdf

Previously I mentioned that M. D Coogan supported (including with Latin
pronunciation discussion) the origin of element from the beginning of the
second half of the (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, etc.) alphabet, LMN.
"Alphabets and Elements," Bulletin of the American Schools
of Oriental Research 216 (1974) 61-3;  ")LP, To Be an Abecedarian," J. of the
American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990) 322. Even if not conclusive, I think it
merits mention in dictionaries such as OED. Skeat accepted it. So does Wm
Hallo, Origins : the ancient Near Eastern background of some modern western
institutions (1996) p. 39. I think it's amusing that a proposed origin for
element is Greek for elephant, somehow (in a manner unclear to me) via ivory
letters, whereas elephant itself may be from eleph, aleph, the Hebrew letter
for ox. Admittedly the proposal of Eleph-Hind for Indian elephanr went too far
(what type elephants did Hannibal use by the way?), Elephant from aleph is
plausible, IMO.

Coogan (in JAOS) makes interesting observations on Greek verbs, including one
for doing the Phoenician thing (with letters). Epiphanius (c. 375), born and
raised in Judaea, using a rare verb, observed that "among the Hebrews a child
is exhorted to learn aleph, and among the Greeks it happens to be called
alphein, 'to seek'" Coogan explains: to learn in the West Semitic verb
root )LP
is derived from aleph. Epiphanius was a subject of my dissertation. I guess at
some etymologies for fun. One that I've studied (itself and the history of
scholarship) for decades is "Essenes" via several Greek spellings--Epiphanius
also spells Ossaioi and Ossenoi--to Hebrew 'osey hatorah, observers of
torah, a
self-designation (not accepted by their opponents) found in some of the
Dead Sea
Scrolls (e.g. 1QpHab) as a self-designation.(1)

Stephen Goranson
http;//www.duke.edu/~goranson

(1) If I may say so, the origin is increasingly being recognized, eg. by
Catherine Murphy (via Google Books), Wealth in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the
Qumran Community (2002) p. 403:

"If the problem of the name of the sect [Essenes] has been resolved by
Goranson,
there are still other discrepancies of content between the scrolls and the
secondary ..."

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