Risen indeed

 

An Egyptian-American Muslim colleague of mine  received an e-mail from his Egyptian-American Coptic friend, addressed to a roster of friends and acquaintances both Christian and Muslim.   The message read, in its entirety:

Have a blessed Easter.

Risen indeed.

Now, my colleague occasionally has difficulties with nuances of English, even after a couple of decades of residence in the U.S.   But he did understand that this terse and telegraphic phrase asserted the Resurrection of Jesus.

Though Muslim to the core, he is quite accepting of the other Abrahamic faiths (indeed, has more than once attended services with Christian friends), and he was happy to receive this blessing from a friend.   He then asked me, in confidence (since he knows that I am candid about such things), whether all Christian denominations believed in the Resurrection.

            “Um … yes,” I replied.   (The “Um” part was to stall for time while the taken-aback-sensation passed.  In a similar fashion, some years ago, a young woman colleague, university-educated and soon to be well traveled, asked me out of the blue, “Do Jews believe that Jesus is the Messiah?”   -- “Um … no,” was my reply.)

His own reply was a surprise.  “Then we believe the same thing!” he exclaimed, beaming.   For the Koran (he went on) proclaimed that God “lifted” Jesus up to Paradise (rafa`a).   I expressed satisfaction at this congruence, and privately desired that the message might spread to outfits like ISIL and Boko Haram, who might, please, accordingly  knock it off.

He went on to inform me that (according to Muslims) Jesus of Nazareth (upon whom be peace) had not actually been crucified.   I had heard this motif before in connection with the Ahmadiyya (a pure simulacrum had been crucified in his place); but my colleague added a neat twist, reminiscent of the trope wherein the executioner hoists with his own petard:   God had caused the very soldier leading Jesus to Golgotha  to suddenly take on the mild carpenter’s appearance.  

“That’s not in the Koran,” I frowned.  -- “No,” he conceded.

“Hadith?”  (There are tens of thousands of these, some sounder than others, you never known what might be found in some of the doubtful ones.)  --  He considered.  “In the culture,” he finally said.

Which is to say:  Folklore, like “December 25”.   (None but the most ignorant Christian will take offense if you state that we really have no idea what day Jesus was born on.)

Well -- He is born, and He is risen.  Peace on Earth, good will to men.

A vision common to Christianity and Islam

(Nur mit ein bißchen anderen Worten)

~

[Philological footnote]  The Arabic, rafa`, is literally ‘raised’.   Thus, it is not quite equivalent to resurrexit, in what might elsewhere be a small  but is here a crucial difference:  rafa` is comptabile with Jesus having been raised to Paradise while still alive, like Elijah.  There is nothing in the Koran saying that he was risen from the dead.

~

With our linguistic caps on, let us look more closely at the wording of that greeting.   To a Muslim with an uncertain grasp of English, it might seem no more than you might find on a Hallmark card.   It is thus the perfect two-tier or encapsulated expression:   no more than a smooth rock, or black box, to the uninitiated;  but a treasure-chest  which springs open at the click, to initiates.

The standard American greetings that those of my generation grew up with  were “Happy Easter” and “Merry Christmas”.   But as those holdays became increasingly commercialized, some observent Christians have come increasingly to say “Blessed Easter” or “Easter Blessings”, to make it plain that they are actually referring to the holy-day and not simply a time to hunt eggs or find discounts at the Mall (or as a counterpunch to the latterday degradation of even “Merry Christmas” to “Season’s Greetings”).  You would not say it to someone you knew to be an atheist;  though you might say it to a kindly stranger.

 

“Risen indeed”, by contrast, is not used  even by the generality of Christians, let alone to those of other faiths or none.  It specifically echoes the antiphonal style of worship, priest and congregation:      

    

   “The Lord be with you” 

   Rx: “And also with you.”   

   “Christ is risen.” 

   Rx: “He is risen indeed.”    

 

And by leaving off the first two words of the latter formula, pronoun and auxiliary verb, the writer made it clear that he was echoing the ritual greeting, which you may hear in Orthodox, Catholic and Episcopal services, but not among churches whose liturgy or worship-style is not antiphonal.

Among the Eastern Orthodox, this formula is known as the Paschal troparion:   Χριστὸς ἀνέστη.

The English Wikipedia has a particlarly nice article on this topic, as does the Russian version:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paschal_greeting

Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

[Update]  The whole offering-and-response style recalls, actually, Arabic.  There are dozens or scores, if not hundreds, of formulaic greetings and blessings, each with a prescribed response.   This scarcely exists in English, apart from “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome”.  (Arabic:  shukran. -- `afwan.)

Thus:  To al-salaam `aleykum, you reply Wa-`alaykum al-salaam.  (“Hello.” -- “Hello back.”)

To SabaaH al-xayr (“Good morning”), SabaaH al-nuur (literally “Morning of light”;  with many further variants.)

To na`iiman! (a salutation to someone who has evidently just bathed, or shaved, or had a haircut):  Allah yin`im `ayleek.

And so on.

There is thus, both a theological aspect to the responsory mode of worship, and a cultural/aesthetic one:  both typical of the Mideast.

[Further update]  Apart from the context of worship, such ritualized exchanges are typical of traditional societies, and indeed help constitute their social cement.   Contemporary American is sadly lacking in these:  a lonely survival is “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome” -- and even this may go the way of the dodo  as the custom of so much as thanking  fades, along with that relic of our mother’s day, the Thank-You Note.

(As, https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2025/08/26/carolyn-hax-cash-gifts-thank-you-notes/

Nieces prefer getting cash gifts and not sending thank-you notes.   Sending cash feels like paying bills  to this aunt, and nieces’ lack of response to gifts  makes it even worse.)

 

But the forefathers of our ancestors in the northern isles, were replete with these.   A fossil of one survives in the mysterious word wassail, now known to most speakers only in some old Christmas carols.  In origin, it is a salutation; grammatically, an imperative.  And it came with its own antiphon:

 

Host:  Wassail!  [cognate with Old Norse ves heill ‘be hale’, as in “hale and hearty” and “to your health”]

Guest:  Drink-hail!

 

Ah, the days, those were the days;  those were the days  indeed.

 

Words of the Day: sublunary, postlapsarian, …

Re Melanesians:

“When a native says that he is a man, he means that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast.”

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896)

~

Perhaps the first word we heard, ourselves still children, which, rather than simply denoting something new (like a previously unencountered animal), designated something old in a new way, and thus reframed us, was:   Earthling.   In terms of reference, the word is synonymous with people;  but its intension  (with an -s-, not -t-; a term of art among linguistic philosophers, referring to the way it picks its referent out) is different.  (Thus likewise morning star and evening star, both referring -- though from different lookouts -- to Venus.) 

We meet this first in science fiction, and it permanently expands the mind.   When the exploits of the spacemen are forgotten  along with other tales of the nursery, we yet retain the spaciousness of the new view.  “I went to the mall with three of my friends”;  “I went to the mall with three…. fellow Earthlings”:  we sense the wider world beyond our plankboard stage.

(We just came across a mirror-term to earthling:

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space  were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings.

-- Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1991), p. 172 )

Another take on the same referents (namely, our earthly selves) is human.  Though the word is of course by now quite common, it was not always so, being a scientific word, borrowed from Latin (humanus, from homo; if there be a further relation to humus, then we have an interesting parallel -- again ‘earthling’, but now in the sense of ‘sons of the soil’).   By this term we are distinguished from animals;  but as everyone learns that perfectly well from an infant age, we do not need this word to teach us the species perspective.

Rather otherwise is mortal -- again from Latin, from the word for ‘death’.  In this secularized age, the average reader might think of this as a kind of moldy Sunday-school word, but the original sense among the pagan Greeks and Romans  was as opposed, not to God, but to the immortals -- the gods.  This is the sense that survives in the phrase “What fools we mortals be” (in Shakespeare’s most robustly pagan play).
An unexpected limitation in this word immortal  is evidenced by the following splendid epigram:

The actual infinity of a Platonist  is as seen by a mathematician who is eternal;

The potential infinity of the Intuitionists  is as seen by a mathematican who is merely immortal.

This is brilliant.  We expect the distinction to be between an idealized immortal mathematician, with all the time in the world to count to infinity, and a mortal one, who feels time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, though he might make do with Supertasks:  accordingly, we initially take eternal simply as a stylistic synonym for immortal, before the second strophe brings us up short.  The Cumaean sibyl was merely immortal -- and consequently longed for easeful death.   Whereas the Platonist beholds the world of Forms  sub specie aeternitatis.  

(The epigram above comes not from a treatise of theology, but from a book of set theory and its logic.  I am quoting from memory, and possibly amiss, since Google finds, not that, but mostly philosophical and theological works.

-- Ha!  wait, found it, nestling on my shelves.   It is from Understanding the Infinite, by Shaughan Lavine.  He states it thus:

The idealization of experience that yields the actual infinite of classical mathematics  is that of the Eternal Mathematician, while the one that yields the potential infinite of intuitionistic mathematics  is that of the Immortal Mathematician.

But I like my misquotation rather better, and so shall leave it.)

~

A particularly delightful word,  containing, as were it a microcosm, a whole philosophy, is the word sublunary:  meaning, in the old cosmology, all that is to be found beneath the Sphere of the Moon.   (The allusion is not to the Moon’s own sphericity, wonderful though that be,  but to the celestial shell whereon that glowing queen is constrained to move  in regal splendour.)  Which is simply to say:  our everyday world;  except that now, instead of moving about in it like a tadpole in a pond, taking it all for granted, our thoughts now float upwards, and our hearts do yearn.

A simple swain -- yet fain to peer, beyond the sphere

The sublunary world is, in other words, this life Here Below.  And this brings us to a curious etymological fact:  for in Arabic, there are two common words meaning ‘world’:   al-`âlam, which is neutral, like world;  and al-dunyâ, which adds the notion of a contrast:  though now, not to any physical supralunary realm, but to al-âxirah ‘the hereafter’.   Morphologically, dunyâ is a feminine elative adjective, meaning ‘lower, nearer’:  thus precisely encapsulating the notions expressed by sublunary and Here Below, but in a single morpheme.

(The term sublunary has joined its age-mates in the medieval museum;  yet we still retain a kindred metaphor, "everything under the sun".)

~

At last we arrive at the final word of our title, postlapsarian :  a word that contains multitudes.  It refers to life subsequent to the Disaster in the Garden -- the only life that any of us ordinary folks have ever known.

In Adam’s Fall

we sinned all.

Our earliest ancestors, rueing the day

*

For a portrait of Grace and Reprobation,

try this:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

 *

Once again, it is a word that picks us out, every one of us (for even Eve and Adam were postlapsarian at the end), but in a new way, thus differing most starkly from the bland philosophical agnosticism of the coreferential but non-synonymous term human.   It bears within it a deep and stark perspective -- one which we are inclined to disregard, as we scramble for sales at the mall, or lounge back glassy-eyed before the goggle-box (the behavior, however, belying the complacency).  

Yet in a better age, it was borne well in mind;  as when Condillac, in the preface to his L’art de penser (1780), though that work is seen in retrospect as having paved the way to atheism, yet was careful to remark,  that his analyses apply only to the postlapsarian soul:  much as a myrmecologist  (one more modest than Edward Wilson), should preface his monograph with the caveat that the generalizations made therein  might not apply to the world outside the termitary.   Our favorite Neothomist speaks of

… la précaution qu’il prend,  au début de son Art de penser, de rappeler qu’il va décrire l’âme telle qu’elle est à présent, après le péché originel.  Avant le péché, elle avait des idées  antérieures à l’usage qu’elle fait des sens,

«mais les choses ont changé  depuis sa désobéissance».

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 28

 Condillac, perhaps having second thoughts about what he unleashed 

We are, thus, all of us, earthlings, mortals, sublunary and postlapsarian.   Each of these words picks us out from among all else in the Creation, yet each from a different angle, in a way that enlarges our humanity.

~

Linguistic footnote:  We have chosen these philosophically rich words for the fun of it; but the basic phenomena here under discussion  occur more widely.  Thus cordate and nephrophoric (in their somewhat specialized use among philosophers) ‘having a heart’ and ‘having kidneys”:  non-synonymous but co-referential.

Or, to take an example quite similar to that of sublunary:

The expression dry land evokes the ocean in a way that land itself does not,  and by this very fact seems filled with sea breezes -- or rather, tempests, since the particular light in which the land is thereby set, is as a place of safety, reached at last after perilous voyages.  "Earthling"-style designation of the denizens of this default environment, from the salty perspective of the mariner: landlubbers.
Likewise terra firma:  it’s a place where you can finally find your foothold, after your return -- O Earthling -- from your voyage to outer space.

~

[update July 2020]

 

Mensch is a rather friendly-sounding German for any human being;  in Yiddish-English, a mensch is a solid, kind-hearted guy.   In the following, the word is contrasted invidiously with ‘policemen’, who thus are delimited outside the circle of humanity:

“ein Mensch schwer und vier Polizisten leicht verletzt. „ https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article211457365/Stuttgart-Festnahmen-wegen-Auseinandersetzungen-vier-Polizisten-verletzt.html#Comments

Reader comments:

“ein Mensch schwer und vier Polizisten leicht verletzt. „ So klingt linker Sprachgebrauch. Macht ihr Journalisten schon unterbewusst. Als ob Polizisten keine Menschen sind.

-

Ein Mensch und 4 Polizisten- habt ihr das aus Versehen aus einem linksextremen Kampfblatt übernommen??

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Huthi: How to Pronounce it

Having improbably broken out of their northwest-Yemen fastnesses, first to overrun Yemen itself, a previously obscure Zaydi tribal formation  has now captured world headlines and are all over the airwaves.   It’s still early days, and two pronunciations are vying for mastery, one correct and one a mispronunciation.  The correct pronunciation is: 

HOO-thee, 

with the voiceless version of the interdental fricative th,  thus rhyming with toothy.  (Were it the voiced version of our ambiguous digraph th, it would rhyme with smoothie.)  Some broadcasters are mispronouncing it HOO-tee;  this post is an effort to strangle that in the cradle.   (We earlier offered the same service w.r.t.  ISIS vs ISIL;  in that case, the changeling won out.)

This interdental fricative phoneme is not especially common among the better-known world languages, but Arabic in fact has it in both voiced and voiceless versions, respectively spelled  ذ   and   ث  .  The latter appears in the Yemeni name حوثي.

The French language lacks both of these, and the h sound as well (of which last Arabic is richly supplied with two phonemically distinct versions, a breathy and a ‘strong’ or pharyngealized);  hence they are reduced to bleating   “oo-tee”.  But you wouldn’t want to sound like that, now would you.

Arabic Adonis

This week’s New Yorker has a brief but keenly interesting article on modern Arabic politics and poetry, by Robyn Cresswell of Yale, taking off from the Syrian (lapsed-Alawite) poet Adonis.

The author remarks on the difficulty of finding satisfactory translations for this verse, owing in particular to the “rhetorical grandeur” characteristic of classical Arabic.   Actually we see part of the problem, more cultural than linguistic, right in the poet’s nom de plume, Adonis.  Cresswell diplomatically explains the eponym as a “vegetal deity of death and resurrection”.    The thumbnail from the Britannica lays the emphasis elsewhere:  “in Greek mythology, a youth of remarkable beauty, the favourite of the goddess Aphrodite … Traditionally, he was the product of the incestuous love Smyrna entertained for her own father”.  To an American, the name conjures up something like Jean Marais (Cocteau’s greek-godling toyboy) rather than anything religious.

An additional problem for the translator of this poetry is, paradoxically, the relative lack of technical prosodic problems, since it is mostly free verse -- “tennis with the net down” to begin with -- so that the translator has not the challenge of recreating some sense of the original prosody, as FitzGerald so brilliantly did  with his version of Omar’s Rubaiyat, or Charles Lyall’s metrical experiments in rendering pre-Islamic Arabian verse.  That is to say, a translation cannot be really successful unless confronted  in the original  with something that is in some respects untranslatable.

~

For our own attempts to grapple with the treasures of the Arabian verse-hoard, try this:

Miscellaneous Amatory Preludes

Imitations of Old Arabic Poetry (II)

.

Rorschach Morphology

In a classic cartoon, two psychiatrists are depicted in the first panel  as approaching each other, each saying “Good morning.”

In the second panel, as they walk away from either other, each has a thought-balloon, thinking:  “I wonder what he meant by that?”

It’s supposed to be a joke on psychiatrists;  though indeed, anyone familiar with psychology and linguistics recognizes that to be a quite valid, indeed deep, question.

~

So this morning, we have a “Good morning” scandal.   It has been reasonably widely (though not well) reported in the mainstream world press, though so far not the American.  E.g. a high-circulation popular Parisian daily:

http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/israel-un-palestinien-arrete-apres-une-erreur-de-traduction-de-facebook-22-10-2017-7348206.php

La police israélienne a arrêté par erreur la semaine dernière un Palestinien qui avait publié sur Facebook une photo de lui accompagnée des mots «bonne journée ». Selon le quotidien israélien «Haaretz», pour une raison encore inexpliquée, le logiciel de traduction du réseau social a converti cette phrase en «attaquez-les » en hébreu et «faites leur du mal » en anglais.

The BBC’s brief note on the matter  is sociolinguistically useless for readers who wish to figure things out for themselves, since it shows neither the photo nor the Arabic:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41714152

Israeli police arrested a Palestinian man last week after a Facebook post he made saying "good morning" in Arabic was mistranslated to read "attack them" in Hebrew, local media have reported.

Police confirmed that the construction worker was briefly held under suspicion of incitement but was released as soon as the mistake was realised.

The post showed a photo of the worker next to a bulldozer in the West Bank.

Such vehicles have been used to attack Israelis in the past.

There is only one difference in lettering between the colloquial Arabic phrase for "good morning to you all" and "hurt them", pointed out The Times of Israel.

Actually the Times of Israel doesn’t “point out” any such thing.  It merely piggybacks off an earlier Haaretz report, and does not give either the original Arabic nor the purported “one difference in lettering” that would give the meaning “hurt them”.  -- Indeed, to anyone familiar with printed Arabic, that proviso is a cop-out anyway:  The (usual) unvoweled Arabic ductus is so low in redundancy  that, “merely” by changing “one letter”,  you can radically change the meaning of just about any short message.   -- More anon.

Here is the beginning of the original article in Haaretz:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.818437

No Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before arresting the man, who works at a construction site in a West Bank settlement

That detail provides an innocent explanation of why the fellow would take a selfie with a bulldozer.  He probably drives the thing.

It continues:

The Israel Police mistakenly arrested a Palestinian worker last week because they relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook page. The Palestinian was arrested after writing “good morning,” which was misinterpreted; no Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before the man’s arrest.

That bit about the dreadful consequences of not having an Arabist on your payroll is a pleasing one (to Arabists).   Compare this:

Where is an Arabic linguist when you need one ???

~

Back to the psycholinguistic intricacies of “Good morning”.

The linguistically naïve reader (here in the hands of linguistically naïve journalists, so no help) will assume that “Good morning” in Arabic  is completely straightforward, and that any translator -- human or machine -- that couldn’t translate that simple phrase, would be utterly incompetent.

Now, there is in fact  a straightforward, MSA phrase for ‘Good morning’ in Arabic,

صباح الخير

Phonetically (and we’ll stick to phonetics from here on, since Microsoft often mangles Arabic script): ṣabāḥ al-xayr.  Literally, ‘morning of goodness’ (syntactically, an idafa), to which the usual Arabic morphosemantic rules apply.

But that is not what he wrote.

Einführung in die vergleichende “Guten Morgen”-Morphosemantik

Of the languages with which I am familiar, German comes closest to having a word-for-word equivalent to “Good morning”:  Guten Morgen.  Yet even that is not linguistically straightforward:  the idiom involves not guter, but guten -- grammatically an accusative.   So, you understand the way the phrase is used, but you probably have never reflected on its grammar, and perhaps could not explain it if you did.

Further, in parts of Germany (e.g. Schweinfurt, where I lived for a summer with a German family), people don’t usually say Guten Morgen anyway, they say Grüß Gott -- a phrase I am fond of, and frequently use, but whose syntax is obscure;  I suppose it’s a sort of iḍāfa.

In French, a word-for-word equivalent to the greeting is not current.  You don’t say “bon matin”, you say bonjour, literally ‘good day’, or (as in the Le Parisien version) bonne journée (the nuance of difference being untranslatable).  (There does, however, exist in French  an early-morning greeting  which we lack in English:  bon réveil.  I’ve never myself heard that, not being an early riser.)

In Spanish, you must go even further afield, using a plural, buenos días, lit. ‘good days’.

As to what such phrases are used for, there are subtle distinctions.  Thus, in current American English, Good morning! is simply a greeting -- a pure illocution, like hi or hello, with no descriptive content. (Note:  In British English, it can serve as a good-bye, even as a curt dismissal.  Thus, the heavy father in Wodehouse's Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin says "Good morning, Mr Bodkin" to the unwelcome suitor of his daughter, signaling that their interview is at an end.)  Good night!, by contrast, cannot be used as a greeting:  it is a formula of leave-taking -- a valediction.   Good day!, the word-for-word equivalent of the French greeting bonjour, is no longer used in everyday American English, though it survives as a breezy greeting in Australia -- the iconic G’dye!  Good afternoon and Good evening can still be used in the U.S., though they sound a bit formal.  And at least the latter has also been used (at one time, primarily perhaps in England) as a valediction.

As mentioned, French doesn’t normally use “Bon matin”, at least not the variety of French I’m familiar with.  Bonne matinée might be used but, like bonne journée, my hunch is that it is not so much a pure greeting as an optative, relating to what might follow the encounter, like the trademarked American “Have a nice day!”  (I first heard that one in Berkeley, California, decades ago;  since then it has spread like kudzu  throughout the English-speaking lands.) 

As for Guten Tag, there’s that accusative, a fossilized echo of its likely origin in such a phrase as “Ich wünsche Ihnen einen guten Tag”, which is an optative.  Do contemporary speakers feel this influence, in which case Guten Morgen is not after all an exact equivalent of Good morning ?  Hard to say.

In Modern Standard Arabic (and in most dialects), ṣabāḥ al-xayr corresponds pretty closely to “Good morning”, but things get colorful from there.  Although you may respond in kind, usually (in line with the Koranic injunction, “When you are greeted, respond with the same greeting, or a better one”) you say something like ṣabāḥ al-nūr (‘morning of light’),  or ṣabāḥ al-full or ṣabāḥ al-yāsimīn (both meaning ‘morning of jasmine’).

In the dialects, things get wilder.  Thus, in Yemeni, a very characteristic morning greeting is kaṣbaḥtu, to which the standard reply is  baḥḥakum Allah bi-xeir (sic; the initial ṣ has been dropped).   And -- save the mark! -- there even exist untranslatable Yemeni expressions involving the ṣ-b-ḥ root, which my Sanaani teacher explained as “a morning warning” -- thus potentially, in line with the interpretation of the Israeli police, a threat.

However, what the Palestinian really wrote was:

يصبحهم

And in view of what has gone before, you will no longer be inclined to jump to conclusions that you understand all the nuances of that.

First, we cannot  without further analysis  give a phonetic transcription of that, since it is a script sans diacritics.   Morphologically, it’s a third-person-masculine-singular transitive verb, with third-person-masculine-plural direct object.   The verb could be either Form I, II, or IV, all of which have transitive uses. 

So, how did the translator the Israelis relied on  parse it?

The “automatic translation software” is not identified, though its digital facepage is doubtless blushing magenta.    I just tried it in Google Translate, and (taking the verb as form-IV) it renders the Arabic phrase  as “become them”, so the mystery remains.

The most straightforward assumption is that we are here dealing simply with the MSA verb, form II (syntactically transitive, semantically delocutive), in which case  the expression means “He says ‘Good morning’ to them.” 

That is actually a somewhat strange thing to say.  You’d expect more like “(I say) “Good morning” (to you(-all))”.   “He” makes sense as referring to the fellow in the photograph; but who are ‘they’?   The object-pronoun is definitely third person (and thus, the BBC rendering as "good morning to you all" is incorrect).

Whether there is some further nuance in Palestinian, I do not know offhand.  And as for a translation as “attack”, with the information we have been given so far, it is inexplicable.

~

For another cautionary-tale  about the perils of interpreting  brief swatches of Arabic, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/10/rorschach-philology.html

[Appendix]  The article that prompted this post  was of the “Mistranslation Howlers” motif;  my reply was partly out of annoyance with that complacent genre, which often finds linguistic illiterates gloating  over anecdotes that turn out  either to be more gray-area than appears at first blush (such as the one above), or to be urban legends.  A likely example of the latter is the hardy perennial about the Chevy Nova being marketed among hispanophones under that name.   Laymen observe triumphally that, in Spanish, “No va” means ‘it doesn’t go’; epic fail !!  Actually, nova is a perfectly normal word of Spanish astronomical terminology (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova );  it is neither spelled like “no va” (being one word, not two), nor pronounced the same (being forestressed).

The “Good morning” article was at the expense of the Israeli counter-terrorist authorities.  There seems indeed to have been a misstep in the software, though one more subtle than most accounts suggested.  The article first appeared in Haaretz, itself an Israeli publication;  its appearance may have been unmotivated other than by the universal Schadenfreude over (alleged) mistranslations (some of which pass into legend, like “Ich bin ein Berliner”, whether or not the interpretation is linguistically well-founded), or there might have been a little Israel-internal scalpel to grind -- nescio.  But I would like to add a further observation, of respect for those who must work the intricate and dangerous CT mission.

Notoriously, terrorists (and criminals) use cover-terms.  The IC took a beating over a now-celebrated message intercepted (we are told) from Afghanistan on September 10, 2001: “The match begins tomorrow.”  The post-hoc Besserwisser wagged their fingers and berated the Agency for not getting that message translated until September 12 (which, given the exotic language of the message, and the skeleton crew left in CT after the relentless whittling-down of the Clinton and Bush years, is only too understandable.)  More to the point than the timeliness, is the interpretation:  Was it really obvious, or should it have been obvious, that this particular message, among a mass of similar things, foretold the 9/11 attacks?  I personally have no idea (though a later news story did aver that the message was eventually determined to have referred, in fact, to an upcoming soccer-match).

Now, as mentioned, the message in the current case  is rather cryptic:

يصبحهم

It is not (according to a Comment to this post, below, from a colleague with significant language experience in Palestine) a particularly usual way to wish someone (or some third parties, in this case) top o’ the morning.   Might it have been an allusion, a wink-wink, or at least contextually suggested one, to the Israel CT team?  In other words, we need not assume that the team just blindly-blandly took the Hebrew mistranslation as the final word on the subject.  They might (given their special knowledge of the folkways of their target-set) actually have known what they were doing.

 

But surely (objects the straw-man, less savvy than yourself), something as simple as a verb meaning ‘to offer a morning greeting’  could not be re-interpreted to mean anything nefarious.  Yet as present company has learned, language has more tricks up its sleeve  than most folks give it credit for.  Consider the following famous phrase of German, which contains a verb meaning ‘greet’:

Und täglich grüßt das Murmeltier

Now, I know German reasonably well;  but when I first encountered that expression, my hair did stand on end (like quills upon ye fretful Murmeltier).   It has the d’outre-tombe knell of those mystery radio-phrases that Cocteau (with a wry nod to maquisard comsec during WWII) stuck into his 1950 movie Orphée ("L'oiseau chante  avec ses doigts").   What could it possibly mean?  Were it my day-job to interpret such things, if it came up in traffic  my first instinct would be to shut down all our embassies instanter.   Yet it is merely the German version of the movie-title “Groundhog Day”.

Inghimasi Murmeltier ... greets you

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