Awake the harp

The first two words of the concert my choir is presenting next Saturday are Urah hanevel: "Awake the harp".  And the first time I saw them I thought (as one does, at least ONE does) Which word is which?

And, with less than a week to go, I thought I had it.

The dawning of this aha moment is based on a coincidence  involving another stringed instrument – the lute, which is related to the "oud".  An initial l can sometimes be a relic of an Arabic definite article. 

 

I mentioned this here:

<pre-script>

The Berbers who occupied various parts of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 1492 had Arabic as a second language, and they automatically tacked on the definite article to nouns; this accounts for borrowings that start with al- (algebra etc) or a- {Sp. azucar/Pg açúcar...

<PER_CONTRA>
[meanwhile the Italian for sugar – as their borrowing came from mother-tongue Arabs – is zucchero. Similarly Sp alcotón/Pg. algodão  but It. cotone, the root (via France) of  our "cotton"]
</PER_CONTRA>

...) or sometimes just l- (the word lute is derived from words that mean the-oud, the oud being a stringed instrument.

<GUESS likelihood="minimal, but who cares?">
I suspect that Spanish láud may have been influenced by an imagined etymological association with the Latin laus (=praise) as in "praise Him with... stringed instruments", but don't quote me on that; it's just supposed folk-etymology. )
</GUESS>

In this case the Portuguese preserved the whole al- –  alaude).
</pre-script>

Suppose that urah was related to "lyre" ; what then of hanevel? Well, isn't it obvious? (SPOILER ALERT: NO). What about "reveille"?

But beware of coincidences bearing aperçus. Before committing this brilliant deduction to print,  I checked here:

The Hebrew verb ‘urah means, “to be awake, to stir, to start to move, to agitate, to disturb.” 

Oh well. Back to the drawin...; no, I must learn the words. There are still seats, and it'll be great:

This Saturday's concert
(for earlier reflections, see here)

 

In other news. I've been thinking about Christian festivals overlaying  pagan ones. (for example Christmas falling just when there happened to be a pre-existing midwinter celebration, the Feast of All Souls and the Día de los Muertos, etc. A while ago, I wrote here,

<pre_script>
Ferragosto is the heathen name of the feast known to the One True Church as the Feast of the Assumption....This tourist site , though, suggests that (like most 'Christian' festivals) Ferragosto has deeper roots.:

Ferragosto, the Italian name for the holiday, comes from the Latin Feriae Augusti (the festivals of the Emperor Augustus) which were introduced back in 18 BC ..., probably to celebrate a battle victory, and were celebrated alongside other ancient Roman summer festivals . These festivities were linked to the longer Augustali period - intended to be a period of rest after months of hard labour.

</pre_script>

But reading a Christmas present (I'm possibly the world's slowest reader), I've come across a lovely example of this sort of cultural appropriation, with added linguistic jiggery-pokery. The author is talking about a tenth century text in which the writer, an English abbot, explains the derivation of the name "Bethlehem":

This reasoning from the tenth-century English abbot is lovely, metaphorical and appropriately Christian, but the name of the town existed long before Christ's birth. Over 1,000 years earlier, the polytheistic Canaanites settled in the region and dedicated their town to Lachama, a fertility god of the Chaldeans (who called him Lachmo). The town's name, Beit Lachama, meant house of Lachama'. When the Hebrews - faithful monotheists - arrived a millennium or so later, they decided a town named for a Chaldean fertility god would never do. They altered the name ever so slightly to Beth-Lechem, which was Hebrew for house of bread'. There was plenty of grain in this fertile region, so even before Christ, 'the living bread' [HD: quoted from the Old English text], came along, the name made sense. Really, it isn't surprising that Hebrew and Chaldean, both Semitic languages, share a common root for 'bread' and 'fertility'.

You've got to hand it to Christianity; it's awfully good at covering its tracks. 

b