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Comment by spondyl | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about this claim and dug up this article from (as far as I understand it), Israel's version of The Economist

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjggcekq11g

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The name “Calcalist” is indeed a play on “Economist” (it is not a proper Hebrew word, but fuses the Hebrew word for economy “calcala” with the English suffix for a professional work “ist”.

However, it is just an expanded version of Ynet’s business/economy section, and Ynet is probably the closest equivalent to USA Today or The Sun.

Is it etymologically related to "calculate" or is it a coincidence?

Seems to be a coincidence - the Hebrew word comes from the Bible (old testament), and means "the feeding, and generally providing of needs".

The English word comes from "calculus", meaning, apparently, pebble, because original counting was done with pebbles.

(I had to look both up. Thanks for asking)

How can a word come from the Bible? It must have existed before the Bible in order to have a meaning inside of it. Or did you mean to write it came from Aramaic?

I mean that it already appears in the Bible, in old Hebrew (which is close to, but isn’t exactly Aramaic), with the meaning “to feed and provide” - and I did not find any documentation about how it formed (or came into) Hebrew.

Which means of course m, that it was already in use before the Bible was canonicalized.

Hebrew is a reconstructed language. Whilst some roots will predate the Torah, most won't.

Several words, like the infamous "shibboleth" won't be inherited, or their meanings may wildly differ.

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