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Munster's Amazing Acronyms (from FB)

Rushing to finish an article, and while sourcing came across something too funny not to post. Some of you will find this absolutely hilarious. To those who don't (yet), I'm afraid I can't go through it now but I'll try to do so sometime soon.


Here is an excerpt from Institutiones grammaticae in Hebraeam linguam, by the Christian Hebraist Sebastian Munster:






This part of the work covers some abbreviations common in rabbinic literature, and there are a few fantastic bloopers. My favorite: ה"ק expanded as השם קדוש, deus sanctus! That's a pretty serious promotion from the actual expansion, הכי קאמר, "this is what he/it [means to] say". And it must've made Talmud study a whole lot more... exciting?


"Can we infer from here that coins may be used for chalipin? Rav Yehuda says, HOLY G-D whatever can be appraised as payment for something else..."


Comments from FB:


Moshe Holender Wow, this is funny! כגיון כגון? What?! זכר צדקה לן, close but no cigar. שי could be any number of things based on context but שיהא doesn't seems like a good candidate. And more....

Dov Dukhovny I also like תלמוד חכם = ת"ח = doctrina sapientis, teachings of a

wise person! Munster was tutored by Eliyahu Bochur, who I'm sure would've

known the correct expansion. I guess he didn't check the manuscript? I can't imagine ה"ק and ת"ח making sense in in any of the places they appear

unless he was looking at the Zohar, which does use ת"ח a lot for תנו חכמים

instead of the Talmudic תנו רבנן. Can't recall if this is a common thing in the

Yerushalmi as well. In that case, even if it's the wrong expansion, it could at

least be understood it as introducing a teaching of some kind. (This isn't

actually so farfetched. Less than 50 years prior, Pico della Mirandola was

tutored in Hebrew by R. Eliyahu Delmedigo, and he was super into kabbalah

and started the whole Christian kabbalah thing.)

Dov Dukhovny Actually, just realized that while תנו חכמים might not be

common in the Yerushalmi, תא חזי (instead of the Bavli's תא שמע) is quite

common, and would also be abbreviated ת"ח. His incorrect expansion would

work there as well.


Moshe Holender Interesting. Yes, I was just going off what's listed in the

Hebrew expansion since I can only guess at Latin translation based on my

French. I noticed it says תלמוד instead of תלמיד but, strangely enough, tons of

people make this mistake even today.


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