[B-Greek] Greek, rather than English, glosses for Hebrew?

Eric Weiss papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 18 11:23:08 EST 2004


I'm trying to learn (relearn) Hebrew, and in the basic vocabulary I'm learning, it seems to me that many times Greek words would be better glosses than English words. E.g., the English gloss for ruach is "breath, spirit, wind," whereas a Greek gloss, PNEUMA, says it all in one word. Similarly, halach is "walk, come, go" in English, but in Greek I would think that ERCOMAI would suffice. Other examples that come to mind are adamah = GH (rather than "ground, land, earth"); yatsah = EXERCOMAI (rather than "come forth, go forth); adam = ANQRWPOS (rather than "man, mankind, human"); har = OROS (rather than "mountain, hill"); goi = EQNOS (rather than "nation, gentile"); shamayim = OURANOS (rather than "sky, heaven"); zerah = SPERMA (rather than "seed, descendant, offspring); lechem = ARTOS (rather than "bread, food"); ets = XULON (rather than "tree, wood"). In other word, it appears, at least cursorily, that the semantic overlap between Greek and Hebrew words has more of a one-word to
 one-word correspondence than between Hebrew and English. Likewise, those who know Hebrew and are learning Koine Greek might find one-word Hebrew glosses to be better than multiple-word English glosses. Any thoughts on this, or anything to document that this either is true or is only true in limited cases?
 
(FYI, I've changed my e-mail address pending a switch in ISPs.)


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