Perhaps the most well-known use of rosh is in Rosh Hashana. The new year in Hebrew is called the "head of the year."
By DR. JOEL M. HOFFMANHebrew Hear-Say logo(photo credit: )
We recently tackled the cardinal ("counting") numbers: "one" (ehad or ahat), "two" (shnayim or shtayim, also shnei or shtei), "three" (shalosh or shlosha), etc. As Rosh Hashana approaches, it makes sense to turn to the ordinals: "first," "second," "third," etc.
Except for "first," the ordinals are adjectival forms of the cardinals. Shalosh is "three" and shlishi (masculine) or shlishit (feminine) is "third." "Fourth" is r'vi'i or r'vi'it, reflecting the root resh-bet-ayin from which arba comes. "Fifth" is hamishi/hamishit. And so it goes. "Second" is only a bit more involved. From shnayim (two) we get one masculine form, sheni, and two feminine forms, shenit and shniya. Another time we'll talk about how the two feminine forms differ.
But "first" doesn't come from the word "one" at all. Rather, it comes from the word "head." "Head" in Hebrew is rosh, and "first" is rishon (masculine) or rishona (feminine). As Golan from Haifa reminds me, this word rosh and its variations are ubiquitous, popping up not just to get us started with the ordinals, but elsewhere as well.
Perhaps the most well-known use of rosh is in Rosh Hashana. The new year in Hebrew is called the "head of the year." (Though, as chance would have it, it falls not in the first month but in the seventh. It's a long story.) The first day of the month, like the first day of the year, also has a name. It's rosh hodesh: "head of the month." Novice but erudite speakers of Hebrew might think that Sunday should be rosh hashavu'a ("head of the week"), but it's not. They're close, though. "Sunday" is yom rishon, a little like "Firstday." The prime minister is rosh hamemshala, the "head of the government," a phrase that works not too badly literally translated into English.
And the mayor is the "head of the city," that is rosh ha'ir.
Apparently running a meeting has to do with sitting well, because the head of a committee is a "chair" in English, and in Hebrew it's the yoshev rosh, "sitter of the head" (a phrase that doesn't work quite so well in literal translation) or more colloquially the "head sitter." The chief commander of the army is the "head of the General Staff," that is the rosh mateh klali, or, in abbreviation, the ramatkal.
And speaking of which, an abbreviation or acronym in Hebrew is the "heads of the boxes," or rashei tevot. A table of contents is the "heads of chapters," or rashei prakim.
Expanding our look a little, we find the phrase rosh pina, literally "head of corner." It comes from Psalm 118 where it means "cornerstone." It certainly doesn't mean what the English "headstone" means (that is, a stone that marks a grave), or what the Hebrew "headstone" - that is, even harosha - means (it's the top stone of an arch).
We find the adjective, rishon, used, as we saw, for "first," and also more generally for a few common things that came first. The rishonim (masculine plural) are the people who came long before us, and the rishonot (feminine plural) are the events that the rishonim witnessed.
The feminine singular, rishona, appears in the phrase barishona, "at first." Similar to the emphatic English, "first and foremost" is the Hebrew b'rosh uvarishona.
Add the adjectival ending -i to the word rishon (even though it's already an adjective) and you get rishoni, "prime," as in a prime number.
And similar to all of these is b'reshit, the word at the beginning of the Bible which is usually translated "in the beginning," though the 11th century commentator Rashi preferred "in the beginning of..." (In all likelihood, both translations are wrong, because an adverb before a verb in biblical Hebrew was emphatic or contrastive. It should be, "It was in the beginning that..." The line answers the question "when?" not "what?") Rashi's name is an acronym spelled resh-shin-yud, but the same sounds can also be the word resh-alef-shin-yud, which is the adjectival form of "head," that is, "most important" or "foremost."
There's even an animal whose name comes from the word rosh: roshan. The nun ending is a common suffix with no specific meaning, and the word means "tadpole."
And finally, the letter resh is a variation on the word rosh, and the letter form itself probably used to be a drawing of a head.
So hidden behind the name of the seventh-month new-year celebration lies as complex a beginning as can be imagined. I suppose that's fitting.
Happy new year.
The writer teaches at HUC- JIR in New York City.joel@lashon.net
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