kartis

Rabbi David Bashevkin (of the enjoyable 18Forty podcast) recently posted on his Substack an essay entitled "The Revival of Hebrew." It's an interesting review of the history of the renewal of Hebrew and the religious response. I won't cover all of my thoughts about it here (you can read on Twitter/X some of my initial thoughts), but it mentioned a particular word that I'd like to explore here.

Bashevkin wrote:

Growing up in New York, high school students must take the Regents, a state-wide exam. Nearly all Jewish high school students take the Hebrew regents as their language requirement. I did not go to an elementary school that spoke Ivrit B’Ivrit (classes using instructional Hebrew), so I was pretty terrified for my 9th-grade Hebrew Regent. I still managed to get a 99 on the exam—hold your applause—I got stuck on one word during the oral conversational part of the exam. In conversation with our Hebrew teacher, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Ozarowski, I was supposed to ask him for a replacement train ticket. Except I forgot the Hebrew word for “ticket.” Hence a 99 instead of 100. I will never forget my כרטיס again.

Then later in the post, he found support in a quote from Theodore Herzl's Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State):

“We cannot converse with one another in Hebrew,” Herzl said, “Who amongst us has a sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language?” As someone who personally got a point off on his Hebrew Regent for exactly that word—a train ticket—I find great comfort in Herzl’s skepticism. “Such a thing cannot be done,” Herzl concluded—instead he advocated for German to be the language of the Land of Israel.

So to help him (and any of you) not forget the Hebrew word for "train ticket", let's take a look at its history.

The word for train ticket is כַּרְטִיס kartis, and in Modern Hebrew it can mean "ticket" or "card" (as in credit card, greeting card, membership card, etc.) It first appears in Talmudic Aramaic meaning "document" and sometimes has the variant spelling קַרְטֵיס. In that last entry, Jastrow notes that it can also mean "paper." That meaning reflects its etymology, as Klein writes:

כַּרְטִיס m.n. PBH card, ticket. [Aram. כַּרְטִיסָא (= document), a loan word from Gk. chartes (= a leaf of the Egyptian papyrus, papyrus, paper), which is of foreign, possibly Egypt., origin.]

The word kartis remained obscure until the dawn of Modern Hebrew, when it was reintroduced for "ticket" (presumably due to the similarity to words in European languages like the German Karte and the Russian kartochka of similar meanings.)

Its Greek origin chartes is also the source of many words in English. For example, Here's the Online Etymology Dictionary's entry for card:

early 15c., "a playing card," from Old French carte (14c.), from Medieval Latin carta/charta "a card, paper; a writing, a charter," from Latin charta "leaf of paper, a writing, tablet," from Greek khartēs "layer of papyrus," which is probably from Egyptian.

Other words with the same origin include: chart, charter, cartel, cartography, carton, cartoon and cartridge.

The Egyptian origin mentioned by Klein and Etymonline is not universally accepted. Professor Gary A. Rendsburg, in his essay "The Etymology of χάρτης 'Papyrus Roll'" rejects the theory, since no convincing Egyptian etymon (the word from which the later word is derived) has been found. He then writes:

If, after generations in pursuit of an Egyptian etymon for the key Greek word χάρτης 'papyrus roll', none has been identified, perhaps it is time to set our eyes on a different horizon for the source of this lexeme [...] If Egyptian does not serve as a source [...] then our eyes should be set to the other great source of cultural influence on ancient Hellas, namely, the Semitic world in general and the Phoenician sphere in particular.

He then goes on to note mention of a Phoenician word, חרטית ḥrṭyt, which was generally assumed to mean "sculptures," but he suggests could mean "writings" or "scrolls." Based on this, and other evidence, Rendsburg proposes that khartēs could be therefore cognate with the Hebrew חרט, which as we've discussed here, meant "to chisel, engrave" and had associations with writing. He goes on to explore the further development of kartis in Aramaic and other languages. It's a really interesting investigation - I recommend reading it in full.

One Hebrew word related to kartis that Rendsburg did not cover was luckily reviewed by Elon Gilad. (By the way, I highly recommend his YouTube / Instagram videos - short clips discussing the history of Hebrew words in English.)  Gilad discusses (in English and in Hebrew) the word khaltura חַלְטוּרָה - "side job, gig, part-time work."

After noting how the Greek chartes meant "page," he continues:

We move onto the Middle Ages, when the word chartularium, a diminutive meaning little page, came about. This medieval Latin word was used in churches for the list of people (usually donors and their family members) for whom prayers needed to be said every day, to facilitate their acceptance to heaven.

Somehow chartularium made its way into the Russian Orthodox Church in the corrupted form khaltura - and with a new meaning: the prayer that a priest says at a funeral.

Priests got paid extra for these private appearances at the homes of the deceased. But after the Communist Revolution in 1917, which discouraged the practice of religion, Russian theater folk commandeered the word for "moonlighting" - performances done outside the theater companies they worked for.

From this sense of "moonlighting" came the Hebrew meaning of "side gig." 

I hope Bashevkin can now remember chaltura as well!

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