Re: Yiddish - medieval Ebonics?

[jdhoy@mindspring.com (John D. Hoy)]

Poster: jdhoy@mindspring.com (John D. Hoy)

 Corun MacAnndra wrote:

>Regarding your example above, unless I am mistaken, YHVH is a shortening of
>the Hebrew word for Jehovah, a name of God that, according to Talmudic Law
>is not to be spoken or written. Mar Yakov can explain this much better than
>I, he being a Talmudic scholar. And though half my family is Jewish, I was
>not raised so, and so I am relatively unschooled in Judaism. Anyway, YHVH
>is also not an acronym, but an abbreviation. A better example would have
>been INRI, which is an acronym for Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum. Or in
>English, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. But again, INRI was only
>written, not spoken.

In fact, the name Jehovah is a construction. I cite the _Dictionary of the
Bible_ edited by James Hastings:

"The sacred name is sometimes called the Tetragrammaton, consisting in the
Hebrew consonantal script of the four letters YHWH. The pronunciation
_Jehovah_ has no authority of all and appeared only in late medieval times:
it is an attempt to vocalize the Tetragrammaton..."

On the subject of acronyms and religion, I am forced to think of a fish.
The early Christians, persecuted as they were, needed some way to recognize
each other. One of these means which still exists today is the symbol of
the fish. In Greek the word for fish is 'ichthus'. The Greek phrase for
'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior' is

Iesous
CHristos
THeou
Uios
Soter

Hence we have the symbol of a fish as representation of a religiously
relevant acronym.


Slán leat,

Eóin O hEochaidh


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