kpozin.net Projects & Musings by Konstantin Pozin

A few years ago, I remember reading במה מדליקין (“With what do we light?”) during Kaballat Shabbat, and noticing something unusual.  The passage talks about materials that can and can’t be used for lighting Shabbat candles, and one word that naturally was mentioned a few times was פתילה (p`tilah – a wick).  I found this very interesting, because in Russian, the word for wick is фитиль (fitil’).  This raised an obvious question: how did Russian and Mishnaic Hebrew (and, as it turns out, modern Hebrew) come to have essentially the same word for wick?

Recently, I remembered this old question, and tried to see if I could figure it out. One possibility that immediately came to mind was Greek.  Numerous languages have words of Greek origin in them, and Russian and Hebrew aren’t exceptions.  I looked it up, and, sure enough, the Greek word for wick is φιτίλι (fitili).  Of course, now the question was, was the word Greek in origin, or did it come from elsewhere?

I also decided to check Arabic.  The word for wick in Arabic is فتيل, which (nearly as I can tell, since I can’t read Arabic) is transliterated as something like fatil. Okay, so it was the same root again, but that didn’t really help.

I then managed to find an etymology database that explained how the Russian word originated: фитиль came from the Turkish fitil, which in turn came from the Arabic. (source)

That’s great, but where did the root come from to begin with?  I tried searching Mechon-Mamre, which has the Tanakh, the Talmud, and numerous other Jewish sources online, for פתיל and פתילה.  And I found something that was quite stupid of me not to notice. The word has been in Hebrew since long before the Mishnah.

For example, פְתיל תכלת (a blue string or thread on the tzitzit) is mentioned in Numbers 15:38 (and in the Shema, from which I should have recalled it). P`til is mentioned in the context of a blue thread in a few other places in the Chumash; it’s also mentioned in the story of Samson and Delilah, where Delilah tied Samson up with bowstrings, and he broke them as if they were threads that touched a flame.

With some further searching, I found that p`til comes from the root P.T.L., which means to twist, twine, or bind – actions that are obviously needed to make threads, wicks, or tzitzit strings. (source 1, 2)

So there you have it – the word came from ancient biblical Hebrew (and probably from earlier Semitic languages before that), found its way into Arabic and Greek, and took a rather long route into Russian, as well.

See also:
http://www.answers.com/topic/wick#Translations
http://ehl.santafe.edu/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=/data/semham/semet&first=1681 (the Semitic etymology of patil)