> >On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Adina Adler wrote: > >> >>David Silberstein wrote: >>> >>> (And for those who don't know, "emma" is Hebrew for "mother") > >>Not really, since the Hebrew word for "mother" is pronounced with a >>long "e", and "emma" is generally pronounced with a short "e". >> > >Well, if you want to get linguistically nit-picky, "emma" is /derived/ >from the Hebrew for "mother". And if you want to get even more >nit-picky, "eema" (with long "e") is Aramaic (note the terminal aleph; >the same goes for "abba"), while the correct Hebrew for mother is "em" >(short "e"). Interesting. Do you have a source for amy of that? The sources that I checked say that "emma" comes from the German word for "strong". When I learned Hebrew I was taught that "eema" and "em" were both equally correct versions of "mother", and "eema" is what my brothers and I always called our mother. (My family moved to the US from Israel about a year before I was born; I used to be bilingual.) -- Adina