The Italian Version

Something's keeping me awake. I went out, had two or three drinks, then I came back at barely midnight, watched the third DVD of Ghost In The Shell - Stand Alone Complex and finally went to sleep. But, at about four I woke up and couldn't sleep anymore, so I decided to turn on my laptop.

David at Rishon Rishon posted a while ago about the meaning of Passover for the Jews: I decided to weigh in with a bit of linguistical dissertation.

In Hebrew, Passover is Pesach - or a rather similar sound.
In Italian, Easter is called Pasqua, while there is no specific word for Passover - rather, it's commonly called Pasqua Ebraica (Judaic Easter, in a liberal translation).

Pasqua is a word used almost exclusively to indicate that particular day of the Christian (and sometimes Judaic) tradition. Now, it's no wonder that the Church uses a number of word of Hebrew origin, because Christianity was born out of Judaism in today's Israel.

The interesting thing is that Pasqua means Passaggio, which is the Italian word closer to the English Passover (it also has other meanings, like gangway - all related to the act of passing through). Clearly both Pasqua and Passaggio sound related to Pesach: it is possible that the root of this word was passed from Hebrew to Latin and then Italian through Greek (a lot of Greek words seeped into Latin). Or that it's a common root between both Latin and Hebrew - but this seems less likely to me.

And now, in unrelated news, Beth at My VRWC was interested in my post on Heavy Metal and my blog in general: welcome onboard! However, while France isn't exactly my favourite country, I won't step down to the level of making snarky remarks about the alimentary or hygienic habits of the French - they're not really relevant in foreign policy.