חַקְלַאי (chakla'i) — farmer, agriculturalist
Etymology
The word חַקְלַאי first appears in the 1896 Hebrew translation of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, published under the name of David Yellin, though his father-in-law Yechiel Michel Pines may have co-authored or even primarily authored the work. The translation was reviewed sharply in the newspaper Havatzelet, whose critic objected to what he called an excess of strange neologisms — words he could not understand.
Yellin responded by insisting that his coinages were not inventions but recoveries of authentic Talmudic and Midrashic vocabulary. At the end of his rebuttal, he appended a list of words with their alleged sources. For חַקְלַאי, he cited the Talmudic Aramaic saying in tractate Megillah (7b): "אי חקלאי מלכא להוי דקולא מצואריה לא נחית" — "if the farmer becomes king, the basket does not leave his neck." However, the actual Talmudic text has the Aramaic form חַקְלָאָה, not חַקְלַאי. Yellin had quietly Hebraized the Aramaic by adding the standard Hebrew suffix -אי (as in יְרוּשַׁלְמִי, מִצְרִי), while concealing this adaptation from his critic.
The critic noticed this too, objecting in the following issue that the word was Aramaic, not pure Hebrew, and suggesting the biblical "איש שדה" (man of the field) instead. Neither Yellin nor his critic thought to use the beautiful biblical word אִכָּר (found in Jeremiah 51:23). Regardless, חַקְלַאי prevailed, and from it was derived the abstract noun חַקְלָאוּת (agriculture), attested from 1903 in Ha-Tzfirah.
Key Quotes
"לו למדת בראשונה ותדע היטב להבדיל בין מלים תלמודיות ובין יצירות חדשות... כל המלים האלה כלן מאלה הנמצאות בתלמודים ובמדרשים" — דוד ילין, חבצלת, 1896
"מה ראה להכניס תבן כזה בשפתנו הקדושה? האם חסרי מלים הם התלמוד והמדרשים?" — המבקר, חבצלת, 1896
Timeline
- 1896: חַקְלַאי first appears in the Goldsmith translation; contested in Havatzelet
- 1896: Yellin defends the word, citing Talmudic Aramaic as its source
- 1903: חַקְלָאוּת attested in Ha-Tzfirah (article by A.S. Hershberg)
- 1942: Yellin's nephew Avraham Shalom Yehuda claims Pines, not Yellin, was the true translator
Related Words
- חָקֶל / חַקְלָא — Aramaic for "field" (the word's actual source)
- אִכָּר — biblical Hebrew for "farmer" (Jeremiah 51:23; not adopted for modern use)
- אִישׁ שָׂדֶה — biblical "man of the field" (proposed alternative, not adopted)
- חַקְלָאוּת — agriculture (derived from חַקְלַאי)