[etni] Applying HOTS to Tanach as Literature - 1
- From: Israel Cohen <cohen.izzy@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:54:25 +0300
On the cover page of "Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) For DUMMIES" ... see
http://www.etni.org/teachers/barry/2009/Infusing_HOTS.doc
... Barry S wrote:
> English Inspector ate my brains
The truth of this statement is obvious as soon as you realize that
Silverbergh has a tendency to drop his aiches.
When I was a kid, all of my friends and I knew that the English idiom
"escape by the skin of my teeth" meant to barely escape, but not a
single one of us knew it was the translation of a phrase in the
biblical book of Job 19:20 (using @ for aleph and 3 for aiyin):
@eTMaLTaH B'3oR SHiNai.
[Remember this Hebrew word meaning "escape",
aleph-saf-mem-lamed-tet-heh. You will see it again.]
The question is: why did Job say this? There is, after all, no skin on
one's teeth. And even if there were, how would it be relevant to
"escaping"?
Enter HOTS. The aiyin originally had a G/K-sound, as in 3aZa = Gaza.
Giving this old sound back to the aiyin makes this phrase sound like
B'KoRSHinai, that is, a pun on the word B'QoSHi with a New York
accent. And the meaning of the idiom is the meaning of B'QoSHi:
barely, hardly, with difficulty. This is not a Cohen-cidence.
This method of forming an idiom ... by (near) transliteration of a
word or phrase whose meaning becomes that of the idiom .. is
surprisingly common. This mechanism is analogous to Cockney rhyming
slang, only the mechanism is whole-word transliteration rather than
end-of-word rhyming. Usually, the transliteration is from a foreign
word directly into common words of the target language. In this case,
both the source and target language is Hebfrew and the Hebrew
pun/idiom became translated into other languages because it occurs in
Tanakh.
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