בלוט / בלוטה (balut / baluta) — acorn; gland
Etymology
The two words בלוט and בלוטה share an origin, two coiners, and an intertwined history — much like the two men who coined them.
Mordechai Lubman (born 1857) and Meir Mazia (born 1858) both grew up in villages in the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire (today Belarus), both were considered prodigies, and both came to Rishon LeZion in the late 1880s under the patronage of Baron Rothschild. Lubman, trained as a land surveyor, became the first headmaster of Rishon's school in 1886. Mazia studied medicine in Berlin and Paris (specializing in ophthalmology) and was appointed physician to Rishon and surrounding settlements in 1889.
As headmaster, Lubman needed to teach the natural sciences in Hebrew — a language that lacked the vocabulary for it. He compiled his own textbook, Sichot BeYediot HaTeva (1893), which introduced numerous botanical terms for the first time. Among them was בלוט, the acorn. Lubman borrowed it from Arabic balut, the word for oak tree and its fruit. He could equally have taken it from Aramaic sources — the Aramaic form בּוּלְטָא appears in the Talmud and in Aramaic Bible translations as the equivalent of the Hebrew "אלון" (oak). The word's pedigree, in other words, was impeccable.
Fifteen years after Lubman coined בלוט, and some time after Lubman's early death in 1895, Mazia took the acorn-word and built from it a term for a new medical concept. In a 1910 article in Ha-Tzvi on what he called "meningitis," Mazia needed a Hebrew word for "gland" — an anatomical structure with no existing Hebrew name. He observed that in Latin, the word glans meant both "acorn" and "gland," giving French and Italian their words glande and glandola. He added that Russian too had a similar etymological parallel. On this basis, he reasoned that Hebrew בלוט (acorn) could yield a medical term for gland. He proposed either בלוט or, preferring greater clarity: "or better, the collective noun בלוטה" (on the pattern of חבורה), to distinguish the general category from the individual fruit.
This indecision between בלוט and בלוטה caused a minor dispute in the 1930s, when the American Hebrew medical journal Ha-Rofeh Ha-Ivri used בלוט while the Israeli journal Ha-Refu'ah used בלוטה. The Israeli form won.
Key Quotes
"גם ברוסית ובשפות אחרות גזורה המילה לבלוטה מהמילה לבלוט... ובשל קשרים אלה בין בלוטים ובלוטות ובשל הדמיון בין השורש פל״ט והשורש בל״ט... הוא החליט להשתמש בשם בַּלּוּט כשם העברי לאותם איברים" — מאיר מזי"א, הצבי, 1910
Timeline
- ~200–500 CE: Aramaic בּוּלְטָא used in Talmud and Targumim as a translation of Hebrew אלון (oak)
- 1886: Lubman appointed first headmaster of Rishon LeZion school
- 1889: Mazia arrives as physician to Rishon LeZion; meets Lubman
- 1893: Lubman coins בלוט in Sichot BeYediot HaTeva — first Hebrew term for acorn
- 1895: Lubman dies aged 38 of tuberculosis
- 1910: Mazia coins בלוטה in Ha-Tzvi as Hebrew term for anatomical gland, reasoning from the Latin glans parallel
- 1930s: Dispute between Ha-Rofeh Ha-Ivri (America, using בלוט) and Ha-Refu'ah (Israel, using בלוטה)
- Result: בלוטה wins and remains the standard medical term for gland
Related Words
- אלון — oak tree (biblical Hebrew)
- גּלַנְד — gland (English); from Latin glans (acorn) — the same etymological logic Mazia used