On the eve of the Jewish day of Atonement - Yom Kippur, I wish our Jewish readers a g’mar chatima tova and an easy fast.
BTW, I just realized that ‘Yom Kippur‘ is very similar to our Arabic words ‘Yom Kapper‘, both of which means the “The Great Day.”
Day after day, I believe that “we have more in common than you think.“
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Thanks for the language lesson, and for keeping the profile and hope of reconciliation between individuals of different faiths.
If you even listen to Hebrew you’ll see that as an Arab speaker you can get a lot of it. I worked closely at my job with a lady named “Varda”. Turned out she is Israeli. I was wondering, “Varda” sounds a lot like “Warda” so I had to ask her what it meant in Hebrew. It means “Rose”. Interesting eh?
Nice blog.I like this.
Nick
http://www.yahoo.com
Kippur means atonement in Hebrew, where as gadol means big or great (as opposed to kabir in Arabic). Yom of course means day in both Hebrew and Arabic.
Being Semitic languages, they both use the root system and larges parts of the grammar and vocabulary are similar (Rosh Ha-shonah meaning head of the new year in Hebrew, Ras Al-Sana in Arabic) though there are wide variations too.
The best analogy I have is that Hebrew is to Arabic what Spanish is to Italian.
The root of the word “kippur” comes from the triad KPR, to cover. Through atonement we attempt to cover over the distance between man and God, i.e. to make oursleves “at-one”, i.e. closer to, God and his ideal of what man should be. The similar root, KFR, in Arabic yields Yom haKaffura, the Day of Covering. GHFR Yom haGHaffara, the day of forgiving, is a reasonable compromise. But the root of kippur is not/not related to KBR, Yom Kebir would be a mistranslation.
Typed that too fast, made a mistake, left something out. The misunderstanding that Kippur and kabir are related comes from the lack of a “p” in Arabic; Arabic substitues “b” where other languages use a “p”. Thus the word for orange is pronounced “bortugal”. I suspect the linguistic shift at work here is related to the fact that in Hebrew the “p” and the “f” are basically the same letter. A loop with a dot (much like the Arabic “faa”) is an f. Take away the dot, it’s a p. So the correct triad for Kippur is, in fact, KFR — which my Arabic dictionary defines as “atonement”, the exact right word. There may also be a relation between the kaaf and the ghayn (Hebrew has no ghayn, so maybe ghayns get turned into kaafs?) which would explain why GHFR (ghayn-faa-raa) yields the word forgiveness. SOrry for the confusion, hope that clears it up. Maasalame.
Thanks for the clarification, everyone!