Menachem Mendel

A Yiddish word which is known by many Jews is davenen,[1] “pray”, or as many English-speaking Jews says, “to daven“. The history of Yiddish is very interesting, and to show how difficult the question is, below are some theories as to the etymology of davenen. [2]

1. From the Hebrew daf, “a leaf of a book”. “Because one turns the pages of a prayer book?”
2. From the Lithuanian davana, which means gift.
3. From the English dawn. Birnbaum shows how ridiculous this theory is-”The proposer evidently did not know the pronunciation of the word and took the w as the German w.”
4. The Latin devovere. “Because in prayer one devotes himself to God?”
5. The Latin divinus. “Because prayer is a Godly affair?”
6. The Arabic dîwân, “collection of poems”. “Because a ‘prayer’ consists of a collection of hymns, poems, and prayers?”
7. The Hebrew דאבינו/de-avinu/”of our father”. “[Because] each of the three daily prayers was, according to a midrash (see bBerachot 26b, MM), instituted by one of ‘our Fathers’, i.e. the Patriarchs.”

Regarding these possible etymologies, Birnbaum had the following to say.

These etymologies are so bizarre, absurd and phonologically impossible that it is superfluous to refute them.

Some other possibilities.

8. The Arabic da’wa through Turkish-speaking Jews. Birbaum rejects this possibility for two reasons. The first is that he doubts that there were Jews who spoke Turkish earlier than the Ottoman Empire. In addition, the primary meaning of da’wa is “lawsuit, charge, doctrine”.
9. Another possibility is that it is from Middle-High German (MHG). In a ms. from the early fifteen-century there is a description of the cantor praying, with the prayer of the cantor differentiated from that of the congregation by using a word derived from the MHG dœnen, “sing, play, sound”.

For a number of linguistic reasons, most of which I didn’t understand, Birnbaum rejects this theory. So what does Birnbaum think?

The term does not exist in Western Yiddish. Hence its source much be looked for in the east. Our first thought is, of course, Slavonic. Here we actually find a form that is phonetically identical with out stem dav. It is the stem dav of the Slavonic verb davat ‘give’. We would have to assume that the bridge from ‘giving’ to ‘praying’ had already been built in Slavonic and the Jews had adopted the secondary meaning. But this theory would lead us nowhere because the Slavonic dictionaries report no such sense. Thus the phonetic identity is purely fortuitous.

…

The problem of davenen is still waiting to be solved.

There you have it.

[1] In the article cited below, the letter “e” appears upside down and reversed, something with I wasn’t able to figure out how to duplicate.

[2] These are from Solomon A. Birnbaum, “Two Methods”, Origins of the Yiddish Language: Winter Studies in Yiddish Volume 1, pp. 7-14.

Posted on February 5th, 2008 under Ashkenaz • RSS 2.0 feed • You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed