Historical-nonfiction:

Hapax Legomenon: a word or form occurring only once in a document or corpus. This term is usually applied to words in the Hebrew bible, whose meanings are uncertain or unknown. Hebrew had been a dead language for almost 1,800 years. The only way it was preserved was in sacred writings. And Hebrew is written without vowels, to give the precise word, and without punctutation, which helps give context clues. It is unsurprising then that the meanings of words which appear only once or twice have been lost. There are about 1,500 hapax legomena in the Hebrew bible. However, due to Hebrew roots, suffixes and prefixes (which have been used to make educated guesses), there are only 400 “true” hapax legomena, ones with no clearly related words in Hebrew.

March 29th, 2016 7:25am