Etymology of the word tallit
quote:
Therefore, if there really were a Hebrew word tallit, the plural would be talliyot. The plural tallitot itself proves beyond a doubt that this is not a real normal Hebrew word.
Secondly, the form tallit. Where is that pronunciation from? The word in not in the Bible, so it presumably comes from the traditional pronunciation of the various Jewish communities and the mss. of the Mishna with vowels. But surprise, surprise: the form tallit is MOA. Not attested at all.
Sefaradim pronounced the word (up until recently) as tallet (dagesh in the lamed, tzere before the tav). Ashk'nazim pronounced the word in accordence with the Ashk'naz pronunciation rules: "tales," with a single lamed, and a shva after the lamed, as is standard for an unstressed syllables (just like shabbes, not pronounced shabbos). Certainly no reason to think that the vowel after the lamed is a hiriq any more than a tzere or a qomatz or anything else. The plural taleysim would imply, if anything, a tzere.
Teimanim pronounced the word t'lit. Shva after the tet, sinle lamed. What about mss. with vocalization? All of the early mss. (including the most reliable, like Kaufmann and Parma A & B) have tallet. Dagesh in the lamed, tzere after the lamed. The ancient siddur of Worms/Vermayze has the word as talet: with a segol after the lamed (which alternates with tzere, as is common in the ms.) and no dagesh in the lamed (omission of the dagesh is also common). So it would seem that in the 13th century the word in Ashk'naz had a tzere, and that was still clearly the case in the 16th century, when the Bohur in HaTishbi punctuated the word as tallet.
So how do the dictionaries and everyone else know that the word is tallit?
The dictionaries follow the father of Hebrew dictionarydom: Eliezer ben Yehuda, who decided, by royal droit (or droit du roi, if you want the French order), that really the Ashk'nazim meant to say tallis in the singular. He had no evidence, but since he was the first of the modern dictionaries, he arrogated the right to make his own decisions as he saw fit.
Since the evidence points to tallet, then the word is not a normal Hebrew word with an -- it ending. So where is the word from?
Look in Even Shoshan, and he says it is possibly from the Aramaic root tll. Yes, indeed, the root tll is well atttested in Aramaic, as in the word m'tallalta for Hebrew sukka. The root tll (initial tet) is the Aramaic cognate of the Hebrew root tz-ll, as in the word tzel. If this is correct, a Hebrew word would have to have a tzadi, the Aramaic word a tet. All find and dandy, except... there is no Aramaic word tallit/tallet attested anywhere in Aramaic. Unlike Mishnaic words like ilan, a common Aramaic word, this word seems to have been created ex nihilo by the Mishna.
Furthermore, there is another, less well-known word in the Mishna which is certainly associated in meaning (remember, in the Mishna, tallet/t'lit does not mean exclusively "prayer" shawl). The word in most modern printed editions is vocalized itzt'lit: aleph, tzadi, lamed, tav, with some immot qriah thrown in as well. Look in Yoma 7:1 and Gittin 7:5. That word in the manuscirpts is written in various ways: the Kaufmann ms. has estalet, with no yod at all, a segol under the aleph, then a samekh, then a tzere after the lamed (which has no dagesh). The Rambam own hand ms. of the Mishna also has the word without a yod before the tav, indicating the vowel is not a hiriq. That word, as the various spellings give away, is the Greek word stol (also borrowed in English, by way of Latin, as meaning robe, commonly used as in mink stole). Aramaic and Leshon Hazal could not tolerate two consonants together beginning a word, and so a proclitic vowel was added to such Latin and Greek words, as also in words like itztadion (stadium) and many others. That Greek word, with the feminine Aramaic ending, was then estaleta/estalet or estalit. It seems clear that tallet was either a shortened form of this loan word, or some original Aramaic word from the root tll (which word is unattested) became influenced by the Greek loanword and its pronunciation. That would explain both tallet and t'lit: the Greek loanword had a short a vowel (commonly used as a reflex of the Greek omicron), so it either became a shva in Hebrew (and hence the Teimani form) or a pasah (which would require doubling of the lamed with a dagesh). Not only does a foreign origin explain the varying forms of tallet/t'lit, it would provide an explanantion for the third point, namely:
Ashk'naz rishonim use the word as masculine. As I pointed out, the terms talles qoton and talles godol are from the Ashk'naz rishonim, not the S'faradim. Other adjectives show that the word was masculine in Ashk'naz, even though it is feminine in the Mishna (and in Greek). Ashk'naz rishonim did not take such liberties with other feminine words with the im plural, such as taynis or shtus or shabbos. It is very plausible that the word was still felt to be a foreign one by the ge'onim and came in that way to Ashk'naz. This also would explain how an abberant plural like tallitot developed: take the singular and just add an -- ot. This was common with Greek words, and then was transferred by analogy to native Hebrew words. Eg. the Rambam has the plural of miqva as miqvot, but the standard form in Ashk'naz was miqva'ot, an analogy to Greek words ending in -- a.
So Philologos' explanation why the plural -- im may be partially correct. But it is also true that in Ashk'naz the word was treated as masculine. And the plural taleysim is correct, since the singular was tales, with a tzere. What about taneysim, the plural of taynis? That can be a simple analogy from the more common talis: tales (remember, shva after the lamed): taleysim = tanis (similarly shva): taneysim.
My comment:
No tallit in the talmud, only a word that could possibly be related, and tallit is not a Biblical Hebrew word. It appears that the word tallit came about during the middle ages.