# Arabic equivalents for Hebrew letters



## jackzhsshcn2009

I was reviewing my Arabic lessons and saw the word "ظمأ", which means "thirst". And then I remembered that the Hebrew word for "thirst" also happpens to be "צמא". Here is the question: what is the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew letter tsadi (צ)? And my second question is: is there any Arabic equivalent to the Hebrew letter samekh (ס)?


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## clevermizo

jackzhsshcn2009 said:


> I was reviewing my Arabic lessons and saw the word "ظمأ", which means "thirst". And then I remembered that the Hebrew word for "thirst" also happpens to be "צמא". Here is the question: what is the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew letter tsadi (צ)? And my second question is: is there any Arabic equivalent to the Hebrew letter samekh (ס)?



I'm not familiar with the word ظمأ but the word I know for "thirst" in Arabic is عطش. If this exists in Hebrew, the root would be עטשׂ because ش in Arabic corresponds to שׂ (sin) in Hebrew.

Anyway, if you are interested in correspondences see this page. Hebrew צ corresponds to Arabic ص، ض and ظ in cognate roots. So indeed ظمأ and צמא should be cognates. The "equivalent" phonetically to Hebrew צ is just Arabic ص although even still they are not pronounced the same. However, we're not talking equivalents strictly - we're talking cognates. It seems three Proto-semitic phonemes were reduced to צ in Hebrew, whereas all three are still separate phonemes in Arabic. So, for Hebrew צום we have Arabic صوم, and for ארץ we of course have أرض.

As far as samekh (ס), it and shin שׁ are cognate with Arabic س. So in Hebrew you have שׁנה (shanah) for Arabic سنة and Hebrew כוס (kos) for Arabic كأس.


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## Abu Rashid

I can't remember which thread it was in, I thought it was this one, but it seems to have been moderated recently, perhaps the link was removed, but someone once posted a link to a chart on Wikipedia that showed which Arabic and Hebrew letters correspond to one another. If the person who posted it could provide that link again I'd be much obliged. (From memory it was cleverizmo or josh, don't hold me to that though)

I was wondering because I recently came across the Hebrew word HaMakom which apparently means "The Place", which would indicate that sometimes 'meem' in Hebrew corresponds to 'noon' in Arabic?


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> I was wondering because I recently came across the Hebrew word HaMakom which apparently means "The Place", which would indicate that sometimes 'meem' in Hebrew corresponds to 'noon' in Arabic?



What? No, Hebrew /m/ corresponds to م. The Arabic cognate of Hebrew Makom is just مقام, not مكان. The Hebrew word uses _qof_ (ق) not _kaf_ (ك).

The only parts where the correspondences are "weird" are with the fricatives, especially س ش ص ظ ث etc which overlap with different Hebrew consonants historically. If you like, you can look at the wiki on Proto-Semitic to see the correspondences of various Semitic language phonemes. Note these are _phonemes_ that correspond, not _letters_.


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## Abu Rashid

Shukran clevermizo,

I didn't check the Hebrew letters to realise it was qof instead of kaf, but that  seems to make a little more sense.



> The only parts where the correspondences are "weird" are with the fricatives, especially س ش ص ظ ث etc which overlap with different Hebrew consonants historically.



They seem fairly logical to me, although sin and shin are reversed (and it becomes samekh in Hebrew, since there's no sin). Do you know if this reversal is consistent or is there cases where it doesn't happen?

Also was that you who posted the link to the wikipedia table?


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> They seem fairly logical to me, although sin and shin are reversed (and it becomes samekh in Hebrew, since there's no sin). Do you know if this reversal is consistent or is there cases where it doesn't happen?
> 
> Also was that you who posted the link to the wikipedia table?



Yes but it seems to be deleted from that thread now. Anyway,  I don't know if I'd consider it a "reversal" exactly. I mean Hebrew shin also corresponds to Arabic ث. There's more of just a "jumbling" of the fricatives in general. Hebrew has less of them overall than Arabic, so there seems to have been a bit of reduction in Hebrew and its close relatives such as Phoenician. 

I posted the link to the wiki article above, so you can check out the table. You can see that Phoenician and Hebrew have had quite a reduction in the number of fricatives. Arabic and Modern South Arabian languages seem to be the most conservative in their inventories.


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## thelastchoice

Abu rashid,
I do not know which link you are talking about but this link will help you :
http://www.meru.org/Sufi/ara-heb.gif

regarding the word you mentioned Hamakom, I think it is this hebrew word:
מקומות
Regards,


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## Abu Rashid

clevermizo,



> I posted the link to the wiki article above, so you can check out the table.



Thanks that was the one.



> Anyway, I don't know if I'd consider it a "reversal" exactly.



It seems fairly consistent to me. For instance, I guessed that the word 'lashon' would mean tongue when I found it somewhere, and the same has happened for many other words. Also all of the Biblical names are completely reverse of their Qur'anic counterparts.



> I mean Hebrew shin also corresponds to Arabic ث.



Even in most dialects of Arabic it ends up as 'sin', so it's perfectly logical I would think that it corresponds to Hebrew 'shin' as 'sin' usually does.

lastchoice,



> I do not know which link you are talking about but this link will help you



Thanks, but that chart just lists the main correspondences, which are fairly obvious. I was meaning the extra correspondences that exist for instance where the Hebrew alphabet doesn't cover a certain Arabic sound, so you end up with two or more Arabic letters corresponding to the one Hebrew letter.

That chart also seems to have some strange correspondences, like all the letters from 'tha' onwards.



> regarding the word you mentioned Hamakom, I think it is this hebrew word:
> מקומות



Nope, the word is המקום


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## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> Nope, the word is המקום



It's the same word, Abu Rashid; he/she just gave you the plural, indefinite form (_maqomot_).

Since, the word is indeed spelled with a _qof_, we can safely presume that it is cognate with _maqaam _rather than _makaan_.

However, the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic suffix _-iin_ (the regular masculine plural marker) is in fact _-iim_.  I'm just throwing this fact out there in the hope that someone more knowledgeable can comment on it.


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## Sidjanga

Wadi Hanifa said:


> It's the same word, Abu Rashid; he/she just gave you the plural, indefinite form (_maqomiim_).(...)


Just a little observation: 
The plural of מקומ is irregular though: It is - as mentioned by thelastchoice - מקומות (_maqom*ot*_), not -_miim_.


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## WadiH

Sigianga said:


> Just a little observation:
> The plural of מקומ is irregular though: It is - as mentioned by thelastchoice - מקומות (_maqom*ot*_), not -_miim_.



Oh I see.  I should have looked closer.  Thanks.


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## sokol

Mod note:
Sorry, forgot to post a re-direct - I moved those two posts to EHL (as equating Hebrew and Arabic letters more or less is about the history of Semitic languages).
Now that a new thread has been started, which I've merged with the first two posts, there's a redirect from Arabic to here.


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## berndf

jackzhsshcn2009 said:


> I was reviewing my Arabic lessons and saw the word "ظمأ", which means "thirst". And then I remembered that the Hebrew word for "thirst" also happpens to be "צמא". Here is the question: what is the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew letter tsadi (צ)?


The Hebrew צ corresponds to Arabic ﺹ ṣād. The modern pronunciation of צ [ts] is not historical one. In Biblical Hebrew it was an emphatic /s/, as in Arabic.


jackzhsshcn2009 said:


> And my second question is: is there any Arabic equivalent to the Hebrew letter samekh (ס)?


Depends on whether you are speaking of the history of the letter or of the phoneme. The letter ס has no equivalent in Arabic. In Arabic the phonemes samech and shin are merged to Arabic sin while the Arabic shin corresponds to Hebrew sin. This page shows the somewhat confusing developments of unvoiced Semitic sibilants.


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## origumi

Sigianga said:


> Just a little observation:
> The plural of מקומ is irregular though: It is - as mentioned by thelastchoice - מקומות (_maqom*ot*_), not -_miim_.


Actually meqomot.


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> It seems fairly consistent to me. For instance, I guessed that the word 'lashon' would mean tongue when I found it somewhere, and the same has happened for many other words. Also all of the Biblical names are completely reverse of their Qur'anic counterparts.



I guess you can predict more often than not that _shin_ in Hebrew corresponds to س because there are just more roots with س in Arabic than roots with ث (I think?), so it's more likely that the Arabic word will contain س.

Lisaan and Lashon follow the rule almost perfectly. I.e., Proto-semitic [aa] > [oo] in Canaanite and [s] in Arabic > [sh] in Hebrew. Thus L-S-A-N > L-SH-O-N.



Abu Rashid said:


> Even in most dialects of Arabic it ends up as 'sin', so it's perfectly logical I would think that it corresponds to Hebrew 'shin' as 'sin' usually does.



I would definitely not say that ث becomes س in most dialects. I think all over the Arabic speaking world you find it maintained as ث, especially so among Bedouins who I believe typically retain ث and ذ. In some dialects it becomes ت in some words and س in others (Syrian and Egyptian come to mind), and I think there was even a thread once in the Arabic forum about how it sometimes becomes ف as well. 

I think you are thinking of examples like _masalan_ and _sanawiyye_ in a dialect like Syrian. Well in the vast majority of common words in Syrian Arabic, ث becomes ت and not س. It only becomes س in further borrowings from Standard Arabic. For example even though you have _masalan_, you also have _matal_.



Wadi Hanifa said:


> However, the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic suffix _-iin_ (the regular masculine plural marker) is in fact _-iim_.  I'm just throwing this fact out there in the hope that someone more knowledgeable can comment on it.



That's definitely the case. However I think that when you consider roots and not morphological prefixes/suffixes, _mim_ in Hebrew (primarily?) corresponds to م in Arabic. I think the plural suffix might be the only example of Hebrew _m_ corresponding to Arabic _n_. Although even within Arabic we have seen m > n, such as the suffixes -kum and -hum becoming _-kon_ and -_(h)on _in Syrian and Lebanese.

Even in Hebrew there has been some switching with m/n in the plural. In Modern Hebrew and Biblical/Classical Hebrew the plural masculine suffix is -im, but if you look in Mishnaic writing you see a lot of plurals in -in instead. During this period (1st century AD), Hebrew was the language of religion and religious writing already, and Aramaic and Greek were the dominant spoken languages, so you could probably attribute this usage to Aramaic influence (where the plural is -iin like Arabic).

Interestingly in Phoenician, which is very closely related to Hebrew, I believe the suffix was with -n and not -m. I wonder if the plural suffix in -m is specific to just Hebrew?


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## Abu Rashid

clevermizo,



> I guess you can predict more often than not that _shin_ in Hebrew corresponds to س because there are just more roots with س in Arabic than roots with ث (I think?), so it's more likely that the Arabic word will contain س.



I'm not quite sure I made myself clear there. My point was completely seperate from the 'tha' issue. I meant that Arabic 'sin' seems to be consistently correspond to Hebrew 'shin'. And as an extension to that, because Hebrew lacks 'tha', it probably got integrated somewhere down the line with Arabic 'sin' to correspond to 'shin' in Hebrew. That's if 'tha' even existed in proto-Semitic, not sure. Perhaps Arabic actually 'expanded' them to 'tha' and 'sin' instead of Hebrew contracting them both to 'shin'.



> I would definitely not say that ث becomes س in most dialects.



Perhaps that was overstated then. In the main dialects I've come across (Shaami & Masri) it most commonly ends up as 'sin'.



> In some dialects it becomes ت in some words and س in others (Syrian and Egyptian come to mind)



Those cases are few and far between. The only examples I can think of are the numbers, 2/3/8 & 'thalj' -> 'talj'. There may be others, but I don't think many.

Also when Egyptians for instance recite Qur'an, they almost always mispronounce 'tha' as 'sin'. Which indicates it's a very deeply rooted shift, since most people try to pronounce the Qur'an as 'correctly' as possible. (note: This is not necessarily professional reciters, but your average imam in a mosque, or even just ordinary Egyptians when reciting/praying).



> I think you are thinking of examples like _masalan_ and _sanawiyye_ in a dialect like Syrian.



Yes those words are examples. But I am more exposed to Egyptian and Ghazzan accents rather than Syrian, so didn't really have Syrian in mind.


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## Abu Rashid

clevermizo,

Another thing I wanted to mention when I read back over that thread about etymological links between Arabic/Hebrew, you stated this:



> Really? I take it you don't often peruse the literature. In the current issue of the Journal of Semitic Studies, I found that out of 13 articles, 4 dealt with Hebrew, 1 with Arabic, 2 with Aramaic, 1 with Mehri, 1 with Old South Arabian, 1 with Punic, 1 an unknown inscription, 1 about Akkadian and Hebrew comparatively, and finally 1 about the development of the definite article across Semitic languages (which personally I'm tickled with anticipation to read).



I would suggest that being a Western publication, there's perhaps some bias towards focusing on the languages that are important to Western historical traditions, such as Hebrew & Aramaic (the languages you listed with the lion's share of the articles).

Also out of curiousity is this publication available online for public viewing? I was only able to find a pay-per-view subscription service. It does seem like an interesting publication.


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## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> I'm not quite sure I made myself clear there. My point was completely seperate from the 'tha' issue. I meant that Arabic 'sin' seems to be consistently correspond to Hebrew 'shin'. And as an extension to that, because Hebrew lacks 'tha', it probably got integrated somewhere down the line with Arabic 'sin' to correspond to 'shin' in Hebrew. That's if 'tha' even existed in proto-Semitic, not sure. Perhaps Arabic actually 'expanded' them to 'tha' and 'sin' instead of Hebrew contracting them both to 'shin'.


The first of your two alternative is correct. Proto-Semitic tha merged in NW-Semitic with shin(=Arabic sin) while they stayed separate in Arabic.


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## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> I would suggest that being a Western publication, there's perhaps some bias towards focusing on the languages that are important to Western historical traditions, such as Hebrew & Aramaic (the languages you listed with the lion's share of the articles).


 
There may very well be a Western bias towards Hebrew/Aramaic, but comparative Semitics is already a Western discipline and there are primarily (or perhaps only?) Western publications dealing with the subject. I was just trying to point out that Arabic wasn't necessarily the "focus" or "gold standard" for comparative Semitics. If you read early on enough in that thread (this thread? I can't keep track), the point was made that there has never really been a tradition of comparative Semitic linguistics in Arabic until perhaps very modern times. Traditionally, Arabic linguists have been concerned with Arabic and how to preserve it, not with how it relates to other Semitic languages. So Comparative Semitics from an Eastern perspective is not particularly available.

Are there any Arabic publications dealing with the subject?




> Also out of curiousity is this publication available online for public viewing? I was only able to find a pay-per-view subscription service. It does seem like an interesting publication.


No it's only pay, or for those of us lucky enough to work or study at universities, there is your institution's academic login/subscription which is what I use. However, your state/public library system may have a subscription, so I'd consider heading there to check out journals. They probably only have an online subscription, unless it is a library with a lot of linguistics material on hand. Actually better yet would just be to use a University library with a subscription, most of which (at least in the US), offer resources to the community at large and not just students/employees.


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