Avodah Mailing List

Volume 37: Number 28

Thu, 11 Apr 2019

• 1. Re: [Mesorah] Fwd: Chad Gadya (Ira L. Jacobson)
• 2. Re: Making Gebrokts This Year (Shlomo Gertzulin)
• 3. Lashon haRa in the Shulchan Aruch (Sholom Simon)
• 4. Making Gebrokts This Year (Professor L. Levine)
• 5. Re: [Mesorah] Fwd: Chad Gadya (Micha Berger)
• 6. Re: [Mesorah] Chad Gadya (Mandel, Seth)
• 7. Re: Xad Gadya (Jay F. Shachter)
• 8. Re: Making Gebrokts This Year (Zev Sero)
• 9. Re: Chad Gadya (Toby Katz)

At 02:32 10-04-19  -0400, Micha stated:

>In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba (not Arba'a) Imahot because
>Avot is male and Imahot is female. Yet the text reads Asara Dibraya and
>shlosha Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and Mida/Midot are female.
>Has any one seen a discussion related to this Dikduk Problem? Are the
>rules in Aramaic different?

In Hebrew, the singular of dibrot, as in aseret 
hadibrot, is dibber.  And from the use of aseret 
you can know that dibber is a masculine noun.

HTH




~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
IRA L. JACOBSON
=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~
mailto: la...@ieee.org

----------------------
?There is only one way to avoid criticism:
do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.?
? Aristotle
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I believe that in years like this one, they only prepare the gebrocks food
on the seventh day which is Friday but don't actually eat it until Friday
night or Shabbos. I'm not aware of anyone who doesn't eat gebrocks who
actually eats it this year on the 7th Day.



Sent from my Sprint Samsung Galaxy S9.


-------- Original message --------
From: "Professor L. Levine" <llev...@stevens.edu>
Date: 4/10/19 2:57 PM (GMT-05:00)
To: avodah <avo...@aishdas.org>
Subject: Making Gebrokts This Year


As I am sure you know I eat Gebrokts on Pesach.


Many of those who do not eat Gebrokts make Gebrokts and eat it on the last
day of Pesach. However,  this year the last day of Pesach is on Shabbos, 
so one cannot make Gebrokts on the last day this year.


I know for a fact that there are those who make Gebrokts this year on the
Seventh day of Pesach.	To me this is hard to understand.  If Gebrokts is a
problem during the first 7 days of Pesach,  then how can one make Gebrokts
this year on the Seventh Day?


My wife and I have raised this issue with some Chassidim,  but to us there
does not appear to be an answer to this question. If you can can shed light
on this issue, please email me.


YL
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> When did it become common for people to write halachah seforim on a single topic? It may just be too late at night,
> but I can't think of a single example offhand. Is it possible that the CC's
> pioneering look at Lashon Hara was not only that he pioneered looking at
> it, but that he was a pioneer of what we would call today (in Lakewood, at
> least), "specializing in a miktzo'a"?

I could easily be mistaken, but I thought this was not uncommon at all
during the pre-S"A days. Whether common or not, the Ramban wrotes some. 
Encyclopedia Judaica notes: "Na?manides' known halakic works are:
"Mishpe?e ha-?erem," the laws concerning excommunication, reproduced in
"Kol Bo"; "Hilkot Bedi?ah," on the examination of the lungs of
slaughtered animals, cited by Simeon ben ?ema? Duran in his "Yabin
Shemu'ah"; "Torat ha-Adam," on the laws of mourning and burial
ceremonies, in thirty chapters, the last of which, entitled "Sha'ar
ha-Gemul," deals with eschatology" 

FWIW, 

-- Sholom
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As I am sure you know I eat Gebrokts on Pesach.


Many of those who do not eat Gebrokts make Gebrokts and eat it on the last
day of Pesach. However,  this year the last day of Pesach is on Shabbos, 
so one cannot make Gebrokts on the last day this year.


I know for a fact that there are those who make Gebrokts this year on the
Seventh day of Pesach.	To me this is hard to understand.  If Gebrokts is a
problem during the first 7 days of Pesach,  then how can one make Gebrokts
this year on the Seventh Day?


My wife and I have raised this issue with some Chassidim,  but to us there
does not appear to be an answer to this question. If you can can shed light
on this issue, please email me.


YL
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On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 01:02:34PM +0000, Mandel, Seth wrote:
: 1) middayya and kokhvayya and dibbrayya are all MASCULINE in
: Aramaic. The singular is, like with all Aramaic masculine nouns, has
: the definite form midda, kokhva, dibb'ra; the final -a is the definite
: article.

Similar, "Shabbas haMalka" (ending in an alef) refers to a figurative
king, not queen. (Malkesa, OTOH...)

...
: Even when the word has an -- ot ending in Hebrew, the Aramiac often has
: the -- ayya (maculine) plural. In Hebrew we have a hag called Shavu'ot. In
: Aramaic, it is Shavu'ayya, not shavu'ata.

Well, "Atzeret", more often. <grin>

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Life isn't about finding yourself
mi...@aishdas.org        Life is about creating yourself.
http://www.aishdas.org                - Bernard Shaw
Fax: (270) 514-1507

I wish to briefly comment on something that Toby said, because it is
relevant also for a discussion we are having on Mesorah.

Toby says," He may be right, or it may be that people were still mixing
a lot of Aramaic into their daily language, as many of us continue to
use some Yiddish mixed in with our English."

And she is basically correct, but she misses one point that is implicit
in what she says: HQBH not only implanted in people the kind of speech
to express ideas (as opposed to the way animals communicate through
sounds or songs), He also created it in a very complex way (as He did
everything). One of the features of all human languages is that they
change over time. Sometimes they change rapidly, other times slowly,
but they always change. Sometimes the changes involved borrowing lexical
elements from another language, but that also is change.

That is fact. There is no language that ever existed that does not change
over time.

A corollary of that is that what a person speaks or writes dates him.

Another very interesting fact is that HQBH implanted in humans the
ability to learn languages and learn the grammatical rules of a language
at a certain stage in their development. From the point of view of
psycholinguistics, languages are learned in certain stages that are
exactly like Piaget stages or other developmental stages in that one must
always precede the other, and once it is "learned" it is set, not like
one can learn a date and then forget it. Once the bases of the language
are set in a child, they influence everything he speaks or writes later.

The assortment of sounds, for instance. English speakers learn to
pronounce the eth and edh sounds without to much trouble; speakers
who do not have those sounds in their native language struggle to
learn them. Speakers of English and European languages do not have the
'ayin sound, and they struggle to learn it. And that is the cause of a
"foreign accent." Some people are better at learning new sounds, but
all struggle with them.

Which is all a long introduction to introducing the idea of forensic
linguistics. One can find enough items in anything a person says or
writes to be able to date him. Not to the year, usually not to the decade,
but certainly to the century.

Sometimes we do not know enough about how people spoke historically to
be able to date something. We establish the date for linguistic changes
by getting data from other examples in the language.

Leshon Chazal is different from Biblical Hebrew, even late Biblical
Hebrew as in the Book of Esther. It differs in vocabularym morphology,
syntax and in the few elements of pronunciation that were indicated.

After the time of Chazal, no one spoke Hebrew as a native language. Jews
learned it in school, but they spoke Aramaic.

By the time of the Geonim, Jews spoke later Aramaic and Arabic (or Farsi
or Moroccan).

The Rambam spoke Arabic as a native language. And even as great of
a stylist as he was, one can find clear traces in his Hebrew of his
underlying Arabic.

Back to our subject: how do we date something like Chad Gadya or Echad
mi Yodea'?

Both were clearly written after the time when Aramaic or Hebrew were
spoken, and so mix up some things.

The items counted are half in Hebrew, half in Aramaic. That was also
true in the time of the G'moro. But in time of the G'moro, no one mixed
up masculine a feminine forms of numbers. No English speaker would say
"I saw Paul today; she was rushing to school." No Hebew speaker would say
"ishti yavo hayom." No Spanish speaker would say "la problema es..." No
one whose native language distinguished between classes of nouns, such
as mascuiline and feminine, or the 9 classes in Swahili, would ever use
adjectives or verbs that did not match the class. No native speaker of
Hebrew would ever say "Shalosh avot," even though the form avot has what
looks to be a :feminine plural. And no native Hebrew or Aramaic speaker
would say "shlosha asar middayya." So the person who composed it did
not know to carefully distinguish the gender of the numerals.

No native speaker would have used the form "middayya," either. The root
m-d-d does not exist in Aramaic, nor does any word like middah. The
G'moro used the word middah when speaking Aramaic, as in Sanhedring 38b,
??? ???? ?????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ???

but the word is a borrowing from Hebrew.

And, if an Aramaic speaker borrowed a word like middah, he would form
the plural either by using the Hebrew plural, middot, or would use an
Aramaic feminine Hebrew, middata.

So: the poem was written after the time when people spoke Aramaic.

As Toby says, the poet wanted to use forms that flow mellifluously off
the tongue. So he invents forms that anyone would understand, even though
no native speaker would use such a form.

The form d'zabben abba in Chad Gadya also shows ignorance of Aramaic,where
z'van (in the "Kal" binyan) means to buy, and zabben (in the "Piel" binyan
means sell. Both forms are used many times in the Targum. So whoever
wrote a form like d'zabbin abba here is ignorant of the Aramaic of the
Targum as well. That is one of the marks of the Jews who lived in the
Christian medieval society. They had dropped the Targum from the Torah
reading in shul already in the 10th or 11th Century, and no longer knew
Aramaic other than the words they saw in the G'moro.



[Email #2.]

Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2019 10:38:43 +0000
From: Aryeh Frimer via Avodah <avo...@lists.aishdas.org>

> In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba (not Arba'a) Imahot because
> Avot is male and Imahot is female. Yet the text reads Asara Dibraya and
> shlosha Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and Mida/Midot are female.
> Has any one seen a discussion related to this Dikduk Problem? Are the
> rules in Aramaic different?

The rules in Aramaic are the same, although the form of the numerals are
different. To be consistent, one should be saying t'loth 'asre middayya
and tarte 'esre kokhvayya.

But the question is incorrect in two points:

1) middayya and kokhvayya and dibbrayya are all MASCULINE in Aramaic. The
singular is, like with all Aramaic masculine nouns, has the definite
form midda, kokhva, dibb'ra; the final -- a is the definite article.

Even in Hebrew, the old singular of dibb'rot is NOT dibb'rah, but
dibber. That word is masculine, but with the -- ot plural, which is
quite common in Hebrew for masculine nouns. Maqom-m'qomot.

Even when the word has an -- ot ending in Hebrew, the Aramiac often has
the -- ayya (maculine) plural. In Hebrew we have a hag called Shavu'ot. In
Aramaic, it is Shavu'ayya, not shavu'ata.

2) The questioner should have first asked why are we counting some things
in Aramaic and some in Hebrew? Why not 'arba immahata and t'lata avahata?

The answer is that all the songs after the Haggodo were medieval
compositions, most originally in German. Old haggodos still have "nun
boy," even if they have the Hebrew "Qel b'neh." To make it sound more
authentic, the songs were rewritten in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic,
but the knowledge of Aramaic in medieval Ashk'naz was near nill. They
had long ago abandoned reading the Targum on Shabbos in shul, and
all of the medieval compositions from Ashk'naz in Aramaic have basic,
sometimes toxic errors. No one even really knew the Aramaic parts of
Daniyyel and Ezra. The song "Qoh Ribbon" is mostly based on Daniyyel,
but punctuated in the siddur with incorrect signs: hayvat boro means
"the animals of the wild," and that is the way it is in Daniyyel. But
people sing "hevat b'ra," which means "the animals of the Son."

Chad gaya is sung "di-zabbenn abba," which would meant "that father sold,"
rather than di-z'van," which means "bought."

Why did they bother using Aramaic at all, if they didn't know
Aramaic? Probably because it sounded more "authentic." Just like nowadays,
Jews studied G'moro. Whether or not they understood Aramaic. Most or
all of the children did not, but they learned G'moro like they had
learned Chumash: most or all did not know Hebrew, but the rebbe would
have them read a couple of words, translate them, and had the kids learn
the translation with the Hebrew. When they started reading G'moro, they
already knew a lot of Hebrew, and so understood the G'moro based on Rashi.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel Rabbinic Coordinator The Orthodox Union

> In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba (not Arba'a) Imahot
> because Avot is male and Imahot is female.  Yet the text reads Asara
> Dibraya and shlosha Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and
> Mida/Midot are female.  Has any one seen a discussion related to
> this Dikduk Problem?  Are the rules in Aramaic different?

In Hebrew, dibbroth is strictly a post-Biblical form. In the Torah it is
always dvarim, which is both grammatically and morphologically masculine.

As for Aramaic, I do not know whether dibbrayya or middayya are
grammatically masculine, but they are clearly morphologically masculine.
More precisely, they are in the form of a masculine plural with the
definite article. If they were feminine plurals with the definite
article, they would be dibbratha and middatha. Look at the Targum to,
e.g., Exodus 37:5, where there is a masculine plural with the definite
article, right next to a feminine plural with the definite article --
"w'a`al yath arixayya b`izqatha" -- and observe the difference in the
form of the two words. So it is likely that your grammatical assumptions
are incorrect, and that dibbrayya and middayya are both masculine.

                        Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
                                j...@m5.chicago.il.us
                                http://m5.chicago.il.us

                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"

On 10/4/19 2:56 pm, Professor L. Levine via Avodah wrote:
> 
> I know for a fact that there are those who make Gebrokts this year on 
> the Seventh day of Pesach.? To me this is hard to understand.? If 
> Gebrokts is a problem during the first 7 days of Pesach,? then how can 
> one make Gebrokts this year on the Seventh Day?
> 

If it were a real halachic problem then it could not be eaten on the 
eighth day either.  But it is not a real halachic problem, it is only a 
chumra, because a cheshash of chometz.  Al pi din one does not have to 
worry about this cheshash, and one may eat it even on the first day, 
which is why nobody has any objection whatsoever to your choice to do 
so; but since it *is* a real cheshash there are many who choose to be 
stricter during the first seven days.  That doesn't make it forbidden. 
So when the eighth day is on Shabbos the only question that arises is 
whether to prepare it on the Friday using the eruv tavshilin, or to do 
so on Erev Yomtov.

-- 
Zev Sero            A prosperous and healthy 5779 to all
z...@sero.name       Seek Jerusalem's peace; may all who love you prosper

In Avodah Digest, Vol 37, Issue 27 dated 4/10/2019 R'  Aryeh Frimer <Aryeh.Fri...@biu.ac.il> writes:
> In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba Imahot becauseAvot is
> male and Imahot is female. Yet the text reads Asara Dibraya andshlosha
> Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and Mida/Midot are female.Has any
> one seen a discussion related to this Dikduk Problem? Are therules in
> Aramaic different? <<

This thread migrated to Mesorah, without changing the subject line. In
all the learned back-and-forth I did not see anyone note the simple fact
that the Avos, the Imahos, the Dibraya and the Midaya do not appear in
Chad Gadya at all! The subject line should have been "Echad Mi Yodeia."

Echad Mi Yodeia is written in a mash-up of Hebrew and Aramaic, and
there is an excellent reason for that. It rhymes beautifully and is very
enjoyable to sing! Beginning with the number five, everything rhymes:5
chumshei Torah6 sidrei Mishna7 yemei Shabata8 yemei milah9 yarchei
leidah10 dibraya11 kochvaya12 shivtaya13 midaya

All the numbers (chamisha, shisha, etc) are Hebrew. Almost all the words
in the poem are Hebrew (including sidrei, yemei, yarchei). The only
words in Aramaic are words at the end of a line, where the Hebrew would
not make a rhyme.Hebrew: Torah, Mishna, milah, leidahAramaic: Shabata,
dibraya, kochvaya, shivtaya, midaya

I doubt the poet gave any thought to correct Aramaic dikduk. It's a song,
and it rolls sweetly and smoothly off the tongue.

BTW it is not surprising that this poem/song was confused with Chad
Gadya, which likewise has a multiplicity of smoothly rhyming Aramaic
"--ah" words. Gadya, shunra, chalba,chutra, nura, maya, sora. And let
us not forget Abba!

R' Seth Mandel says Chad Gadya was composed at a time when Aramaic was
no longer a spoken tongue. He may be right, or it may be that people
were still mixing a lot of Aramaic into their daily language, as many
of us continue to use some Yiddish mixed in with our English. Over time
people would have simplified their folk-Aramaic and forgotten some of
the grammar. To give an analogy, most Yiddish speakers today don't pay
attention to which words are masculine and which are feminine, and don't
know when you're supposed to say der, dos, dem or di.

RMS also says that Chad Gadya is taken from an older popular German song,
and he may well be right about that, too. I have a book of Mother Goose
rhymes, some centuries old, and one of them is a rhyme that is very
similar to Chad Gadya. It has a stick hitting a dog, a fire burning the
stick, water putting out the fire, even an ox lapping up the water. But
instead of a father it has an old woman, and somewhere in the sequence
of events is a pig jumping over a stile. Needless to say, HKBH makes no
appearance in the Mother Goose version.

--Toby Katzt6...@aol.com


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