Meeting between Brother Yohanan and Even Shoshan
The project of translating the vocabulary of Christian faith into Hebrew is a fascinating story. Thanks to Brother Yohanan, we publish here another small chapter in this story concerning the meeting of Brother Yohanan Elihai, a pioneer in the translation project, and Avraham Even Shoshan, compiler of the complete dictionary of the Hebrew language.
On September 4, 1981, Yohanan Elihai visited Avraham Even Shoshan (compiler of the huge dictionary that is named after himself). A long discussion took place about Christian terminology, about the correspondence with Father Beauchais, who had stressed the importance of taking this step. Yohanan had thus taken this step and approached Even Shoshan with a list of words he had invented together with Yehoshua Blum) in order to see whether there would be the possibility of entering them into the dictionary.
The words were:
??????? lay person
?????? hermitage
??????? martyr
??????? patron
???????? communion
?????? ?- take communion
???????? Eucharist
??????? oraison
????????? sacrament
??????? censer
The last word was in fact a word that already existed.
As far as Yohanan can remember, Even Shoshan tended to agree at least to the words for hermitage, martyr, communion and perhaps Eucharist.
He also promised to discuss the list however he died shortly thereafter without having been able to achieve anything.
The atmosphere was very friendly and Even Shoshan explained that he was waiting for an “instilator” (word used in Hebrew slang for a plumber) to repair his “boiler” (both terms derived from European vernacular).
Yohanan understood that the great expert of Hebrew terminology was after all just a normal human being who spoke the language of the street.
On the day of the visit he was considerably older than he is in the picture but also a lot friendlier and less serious.
