‘Enuf Sed’

Spelling, Pronunciation, & Halacha

An Aide To Hilchos Brachos and Shabbos

The English language has many nuscha’os. The following history is not only fascinating, but it will serve to highlight the kedushah and gadlus of Lashon Hakodesh—and it will also provide a springboard for a great hilchos Shabbos question.

Until the advent of the printing press, most people were illiterate. Books were rare; they were handwritten and often chained to the wall. By the sixteenth century, the English language was still relatively in its infancy. Official rules of spelling, grammar, and syntax were, for practical purposes, nonexistent. See here where this realty effects the laws of gittin.

In the 1700s, all of this began to change. By then, the civilized world had nearly perfected the art of printing and bookbinding. The average person soon became fascinated by the published word, whether in books or in newspapers. But reading and writing in English were complicated endeavors as there was no uniform spelling, and even letter forms had not yet been universally determined. For example, the I and the J were not yet distinct from each other.

This vacuum of standards was filled by Samuel Johnson, who took ten years to complete A Dictionary of the English Language. It was published in 1755, and it is a feat still celebrated as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship ever performed by one individual” (Walter Bate, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a 1977 biography of Johnson).

Such an undertaking was highly subjective. For instance, Johnson gave us not only the spelling and definition of his occupation, “lexicographer,” but added his own editorial comment: “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

Consistent in his somewhat morose approach, he defines “dull” as “not exhilarating; not delightful; as ‘To make dictionaries is dull work.’”

So why haven’t most readers ever heard of Johnson? Enter Noah Webster of Merriam-Webster fame, who upstaged him.

A radical patriot and former editor for Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party, Webster wanted to break away from European culture and popularized the term “American values.” In his opinion, those values included spelling and grammar. Hence the title for his 1786 volume The American Spelling Book.

In 1826 he completed his magnum opus, patriotically titled An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster learned close to thirty languages during his research!

Among his “American values” were simplified phonetic spellings. He kept the k in words such as back and luck but expunged it from most others, such as musick (music) and publick (public). In addition, the suffix re changed to er, turning mastre into master. Popular opinion backed him, but remnants of this battle are still evident in the British spelling of words such as centre and theatre.

Initially—and to the relief of the British—Webster was not much of a salesman and sold only a few copies of his dictionary. It was only after his death in 1843 that the Merriam brothers purchased the exclusive rights to it, and Merriam-Webster was born.

The British were enraged and fought back, engendering perhaps the most boring national crisis in history. But Webster’s spellings and definitions soon influenced even the formidable British OED, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Webster did fail, however, in his desire to simplify spelling and make it more phonetic. He was hoping for soop (soup), tung (tongue), and iland (island), but these and others never materialized.

Further demonstrating the fluidity of language, this dor haflagah continued into the twentieth century. In 1906, Mark Twain and other American notables founded the Simplified Spelling Board. Their goal was to streamline spelling and pare it down to essentials—for example, det (debt) and giv (give). But that’s a story for another time.

Why am I sharing all of this? Aside from my history itch, there are a number of lessons here.

As a bachur, I once met a young talmid chacham named Natan Gamedze. He was born an African prince, and his family’s wealth afforded him an ideal education that was largely language-focused; in fact, he spoke 13 languages.

In school one day, he saw a boy writing “backward” and asked about it. The boy was writing Hebrew. Intrigued, he asked for a tutor to teach him this ancient tongue.

He was soon amazed to discover that this language was unlike any other. All other languages were composed of an arbitrary phonetic system and an even more arbitrary system of definition and meaning. Not this one! He recognized that Hebrew words represented the very essence of whatever they described, expressing innate truths.

Not only was each word’s root, spelling, and meaning unchanging—and unchangeable by human intervention—but its source was Divine. Even the shapes of the letters and their placement in a word held untold mysteries.

This was what prompted him to start down the path toward becoming a ger tzedek.

In fact, I once heard from a reliable source that ArtScroll’s bestselling single volume (aside from Gemaras and siddurim) is The Wisdom of the Hebrew Alphabet by Rabbi Michael L. Munk, a master treatise on this subject.

There’s a nugget of mussar here. The ability to master the “King’s English” is grand, and many American gedolim, such as Rav Mordechai Gifter, demanded nothing less from their talmidim. But it is no comparison at all to the language of the King of kings. We mustn’t forget that English is recent, arbitrary, and often political. Lashon Hakodesh, in contrast,is Divine.

This brings us to a halachic issue.

For many years now, whenever I have the zechus to give a shiur on hilchos brachos, I always start with the same introduction: “Imagine that you are Mr. Noah Webster. How would you define the word ‘bread’ succinctly?”

Participants quickly volunteer definitions, such as “baked dough.” I then ask, “So pretzels are bread? What about cake?” I then explain that often, the first step in understanding a halachah is knowing the main term’s unchanging definition. Here is the one for bread: “Any of the five grains, ground, mixed into a dough, and baked. If brittle, heavily sweetened or stuffed, it has bread potential if eaten as or during a meal’s mainstay.”

With this approach, a 30-word definition crystallizes many sh’eilos.

What about a granola bar? The debate is whether the definition should omit the word “ground.” What about soft pretzels? The sh’eilah is whether the definition of “pretzel” should begin with “a non-snack item made with any of the five grains.”

Defining the word lechem will also explain why spaghetti and meatballs would never require a Hamotzi even though we make a meal out of it—and that’s because Chazal define bread, or potential bread, as baked, and spaghetti is not.

With Lashon Hakodesh, we are searching for Divine definition. This does not apply if, l’havdil, we are seeking simply to distinguish between the English words “envy” and “jealousy,” synonyms that developed from the way people used them and not from any Divine truth. 

Another example comes from a wonderful sh’eilah I recently received: May one use Crest White Strips on Shabbos?

To answer the sh’eilah with clarity, defining the relevant Torah terms is imperative. For this reason, the poskim debate every definition they give. For example, the melachah of knotting differs from that of sewing, even though they both refer to the joining of two pliable entities. The poskim therefore seek to distill the definition of each melachah down to its essence.

In the case of White Strips, there may be more than one melachah involved, each with a precise definition. These include melaben (laundering), tofer (sewing or gluing), and tzovei’a (coloring). For several reasons, I feel the only concern here is tzovei’a, even though some strips work by bleaching the teeth.

But how is coloring defined, and would brightening a preexisting color fall under that definition?

The poskim discuss at length the definition of coloring (see, for example, the Steipler Gaon in Kehillas Yaakov, Shabbos, #40). According to a number of poskim, it seems that coloring includes the enhancement of an existing color. So if one wanted to shine his black shoes with oil so that the color would be more pronounced, that too might be considered coloring (see Yerushalmi, Shabbos, 7:2; see Shemiras Shabbos K’hilchasah, 14:154).

Please consult your rav…and perhaps a Hebrew dictionary as well! ●