סְנָאִי

The word "סְנָאִי" (senai) in modern Hebrew went through many transformations before settling into its current form. In ancient Hebrew, there is no evidence of a specific name for this animal, and Jews in the diaspora called the rodent by foreign names like "veverke" (from Polish) and "bilka" (from Russian/Ukrainian) in Yiddish. The process of giving a Hebrew name to the squirrel began in the late 18th century, with the beginning of the Haskalah period, when Baruch Linda in his book "Reshit Limudim" (1788) established Hebrew names for animals, among them calling the squirrel "כּוֹחַ" (koach) - a biblical name of an unclean creature mentioned in the Torah (Leviticus 11:30), apparently a type of lizard. Shimshon Bloch continued to use this name in his book "Shvilei Olam" (1822). But in 1841, in the book "Toldot HaAretz," Joseph Scheinhak criticized the choice of the name "koach" and simply used the German name of the animal - Eichhorn. In 1862, in his book "Toldot HaTeva," Mendele Mocher Sforim (Shalom Yaakov Abramovitch) Hebraized the German name and called the squirrel "קֶרֶן הָאַלוֹנִי" (keren ha'aloni, "the oak horn"), based on the erroneous folk etymology that the German word is a compound of "oak" and "horn." In 1880, the educator Aaron Rosenfeld adopted the term "keren ha'aloni" in the textbook "Gan Sha'ashuim," but was criticized by an anonymous reviewer in the newspaper "HaMelitz" who suggested calling the animal "חולדת הסנאים" (chuldat hasna'im, "mole of the bushes"), based on the Mishnah (Kilayim 8:5). The term "chuldat hasna'im" began to be used by the writers of the period, including Rosenfeld and Mendele himself. However, as often happens when a compound consists of a familiar word and a rare word - the rare word replaces the entire compound. Thus, the compound "chuldat hasna'im" was shortened to "סְנָאִי" (senai), a form that already appears in 1898 in the Hebrew translation of "Ghetto Tragedies" by Israel Zangwill.