Language desk
< August 8	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 9

Split Sabbath, Shabbat and Sabbat

Is there any good information on how these words from the same root came to have different meanings? (with Shabbat being almost entirely Jewish, Sabbath having a more Christian denotation and Sabbat for Wicca (and related?)Naraht (talk) 13:14, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shabbat is a weekly day of rest (and worship), and so is Sabbath, and from that arose the idea of a Witches' Sabbath as part of the propaganda for witch-hunts (overlapping somewhat with heretic-hunts), which I think influenced Gerald Gardner in 1954 to use Sabbat as the name of festivals in the Wiccan Wheel of the Year, although he claimed it was a medieval term used by actual heretics: details of exactly what connection he drew between these putative heretics and witches is presumably available in Witchcraft Today.

Different groups with their own identities made use of basically the same word, for their own distinct purposes. Card Zero (talk) 14:38, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, Sabbath, (which the Jews call shabbos), is the name of a day of the week, Saturday (sábado in Portuguese, Spanish and no doubt many languages besides). There is a phrase in the Bible, "new moons and sabbaths". The full moon features prominently in the scheduling of witches' activities. 2A00:23C3:F780:EC01:8886:D77:AE4F:56BE (talk) 16:29, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Shabbat and shabbos are both literal readings of the Hebrew word שַׁבָּת which consists of three consonants. The first one, Shin, can be read as an s or an sh sound depending on the placement of the diacritical vowel marking - the dot on the top. Left is S (to remember, I learned to think of Seattle, on the West Coast) and right is Sh (for Shenandoah, several place names on the East Coast of the US). The 2nd letter is Bet which can also be a "V" sound if it's missing its middle dot (dagesh), but not in this case. The third letter Tav is typically a T sound in Modern Hebrew, but in the Ashkenazi dialect, can also be an "S" sound if missing the middle dot. wiktionary:Sabbath tells us that the English word Sabbath comes to us via σάββατον (sábbaton) in Greek, though before that the same Hebrew word origin. Andre🚐 17:11, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Some details to example Andre's reply: Shin and Sin are different letters, that happen to be distinguished only by the placement of the dot: a given root has one or the other, and changing this would give a quite different word. This is different from the use of the dagesh, which reflects different ways in which one of the sounds in the root gets pronounced, depending on the grammatical role of the word. The different renderings of the word in Jewish use all have /ʃ/ at the start: only forms which have come through Greek (which has no /ʃ/) have /s/.

The dagesh in the second consonant signifies that it was doubled in Biblical Hebrew, hence the 'bb' in all the transliterations. I am not aware of any contemporary pronunciations for Hebrew which actually double consonants, but it does stay as /b/ rather than being lenited to /v/.

The final consonant, without a dagesh, was historically lenited from /t/ to /θ/. Non-Jewish English Hebracists still pronounce it /θ/, hence "Sabbath"; but unlike /b/ -> /v/ and /p/ -> /f/, Jewish tradition has lost the /θ/ sound, replacing it some of the same ways that non English speakers often render English /θ/ (as in "thing"): in Ashkenazi tradition, /s/, but in Sephardi /t/. Hence "Shabbos" vs "Shabbat" (the vowel has also developed differently in the two traditions). ColinFine (talk) 17:35, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the additional info! FWIW, although I did learn the Hebrew alphabet as Shin and Sin being 2 separate letters (and Bet/Vet, Pey/Fey), linguistically, though I am no expert, and in our article, it makes sense to think of Shin/Sin as one letter with two different vocalizations, and seems consistent with the earlier Phoenician/Canaanite/Paleo-Hebrew scripts. The diacritic apparently started out as a small Samekh before becoming a dot (though the article lacks a citation for this and I never heard this before). Andre🚐 18:08, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Linguists have a hard time coming up with consistent and well-defined ways to describe what things like "words" and "letters" are; these are often defined haphazardly within a language based on the internally developed conventions on how they define what is, for example, different letters vs. the same letters with different diacritical marks; not every language will do this the same way in any way that is consistent. That's why linguists prefer to deal with concepts like phonemes and morphemes rather than letters or words, because letters and words are defined rather haphazardly from language to language, while phonemes and morphemes are more consistently definable. --Jayron 32 18:13, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent point - and of course, Shin and Sin have the same glyph shape even though the /s/ and /ʃ/ phonemes are overloaded onto that one glyph and distinguished with the diacritical mark, despite the other /s/ letter (Samekh) existing as well. As in English, where some letters do have multiple phonemes, like s being /s/ or /ʒ/ (z sound) depending on context and orthography. But remember that Hebrew, or Yiddish, is typically written with no vowel marks except in certain situations such as for learners and certain liturgical contexts. Only based on context and familiarity do Hebrew readers remember that שבת is a 'shin' and not a 'sin.' Andre🚐 18:23, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly the same way that English readers know how to distinguish what the different sounds the "s" makes in words like "measure", "dogs", and "sample". --Jayron 32 18:37, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

True, but we at least have vowels in English, whereas in Hebrew, it is sometimes indeterminate what vowel sound goes between the consonant. For example, Vav can be a /v/ consonant, or an /o/, or a /u/ vowel. ~~Forgive me not for using the IPA for those sounds.~~ Turns out the IPA was intuitive. Andre🚐 18:56, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Omly in a historical, graphological sense, does it make sense to regard shin and sin as the same letter (it is like 'I' and 'J' in English - historically they are the same letter, and some languages use them interchangeably at least in some contexts, but in English they are totally distinct). But bet and vet are the same letter in a current linguistic sense, in that the choice is mostly recoverable from the grammatical form of the word, without needing to know the particular root.

Yiddish does write the vowels fully - it's just that it mostly doesn't use the Hebrew diacritics, but full Hebrew letters to do so. ColinFine (talk) 21:30, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The mechanisms involve multiple threads of language change over time and space. In one case, you have phonological change; either because of drift or caused when a loan word is adopted into a new language with a different sound system; the new language will adapt the word to fit into its own sound system. In the other case you have semantic change, which again can either be caused by drift, or by any number of more causal situations. --Jayron 32 17:57, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]