You can find anything on the web.

[cellio]

You know those "rods" that you use to wind a scroll -- the ones that the parchment is attached to, and that you roll and unroll? Today someone asked me -- in the context of a Torah scroll specifically -- what those are called. I didn't know, but I had a browser.

Elapsed time until I had the answer: 51 seconds. :-)


That rod is called an "eitz chayim", literally "tree of life". (And notice how I cleverly avoid forming the plural. :-) ) Apparently, this is because the entire Torah is sometimes called the tree of life, and these are the parts that provide some measure of structure. (That sounds kind of strange to me, but whatever.)

I still don't know what it's called in the more general case, though. Fortunately, the more specific the question, the easier it is to find an answer. :-)

Comments

[arib.livejournal.com]

Plural form would be "Atzei Chayim."


In case you were wondering.

[cellio]

Thank you. Proper grammatical terms are failing me here, but I had been under the impression that a noun that is modified by a nominal adjective was not pluralized in the same way that a "naked" noun would be, and that impression appears to be correct. (If that is in fact correct, and you can state the rule for making plurals in this situation, I would really appreciate it.)

Or is "eitz" an irregular noun? I'm assuming that if you're just talking about a bunch of trees you'd say "eitzim", right?

Re:

[arib.livejournal.com]

"eitzim" is the plural of trees, but when you're say "trees of" you'd say "eitzei" Kind of like the plural of "Sefer Torah" is "Sifrei Torah" while the plural of "sefer" is "sefarim."

[cellio]

Thanks. What about for feminine nouns? Is that always an "-at" ending, like in "birkat hamazon"?

[eub.livejournal.com]

The Book Before Printing says that the Greeks called it an omphalos and the Romans an umbilicus (because it's in the center), so you could either borrow one of those or just call it a belly button.

[cellio]

Interesting! If I were going to make an analogy to a body part, I'd probably pick "spine", not "belly button".