One-Hit Wonders: From Hapax to Googlewhacks
Ben Zimmer
. . . . Hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena; sometimes shortened to hapax) literally means “(a thing) said only once” in Greek, and it was originally used in Biblical studies to refer to a word that appears uniquely in one place in the Old or New Testament. Biblical hapax legomena present a challenge to translators from the classical source languages of Hebrew and Greek, since they don’t have other examples of a word to use as a point of comparison. It’s especially a problem for the Hebrew Bible, since there are few other Classical Hebrew texts to work from, besides the Dead Sea Scrolls and some other fragments. We’re a bit better off when a hapax is in our own language, but they can sometimes be just as baffling . . .The whole article is worth reading. The word "originally used" above is well chosen since the term "hapax" is used pretty broadly in contemporary Biblical studies, from a word that occurs just once in a given text (e.g. "this word is a hapax in Luke"), to a word that occurs just once in the NT, to a word that occurs just once in Greek literature to that point.
2 comments:
I've also heard the term in relation to Homer,
I've even seen the term used (by lazy or linguistically ignorant Old Testament scholar) for rare words used merely a few times!
Actually that characterisation was perhaps unfair, since we seem to lack a term for such words, and they are important to discuss and the true (once only) hapax is merely an extreme case...
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