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Fri 21 Apr, 2006 12:07 pm
Cruise's publicist is linguistically confused. Persian -- or Farsi, as it is usually known -- is an Indo-European language. Hebrew is a Semitic language. The two have zip in common. The Hebrew word for rose, I believe, is 'shana' or 'shahana.' I have no idea what the word for 'princess' is.
sarai - my princess
sarah - princess
( or so i believe)
No, no, I don't think they were trying to say Farsi and Hebrew are related. I think they were saying that they're sort of interlanguage homonyms; eg, a word "suri" happens to exist in both languages, with different meanings. I read that "suri" also has some humorous negative meaning in Japanese, for example. I'll have to look up what it was...
Suri means pickpocket in Japanese, apparently.
And just when my opinion of Tom Cruise couldn't get any lower...
http://www.sky.com/showbiz/article/0,,50001-1219307,00.html
Merry Andrew wrote:Cruise's publicist is linguistically confused. Persian -- or Farsi, as it is usually known -- is an Indo-European language. Hebrew is a Semitic language. The two have zip in common. The Hebrew word for rose, I believe, is 'shana' or 'shahana.' I have no idea what the word for 'princess' is.
Rose - "Shoshana"
And I don't know where they got that Suri thing, because I have never heard that word in Hebrew.
I once worked with an orthodox Jewish woman named Suri.
Merry Andrew wrote:Cruise's publicist is linguistically confused. Persian -- or Farsi, as it is usually known -- is an Indo-European language. Hebrew is a Semitic language. The two have zip in common. The Hebrew word for rose, I believe, is 'shana' or 'shahana.' I have no idea what the word for 'princess' is.
These languages have different roots, surely, but what happens is that these languages become fused by their speakers as, for example, Hebrews who lived in Persia mixed Hebrew and Farsi. The dialect is referred to as Judaic Persian. I don't know what its speakers call, or called it. The same process occurred among the Ashkenazim in Central and Eastern Europe. The dialect that was generated is Yiddish.
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