Elements, Elephants, etc.

[Wilson Gray]

Without proof, all of this is idle speculation. Once "apparently,"
"may be," "perhaps," "seemingly," etc. appear in a claim, there is no
longer any way to test that claim, since it's no longer a cllaim, but
merely a suggestion.with which one is free to agree or to disagree.

Clearly, I disagree.

-Wilson

On 1/25/07, Stephen Goranson <goranson at duke.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU>
> Subject:      Elements, Elephants, etc.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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