Loan words can cause intercultural miscommunication: The case of Hebrew shahid

Sandy Habib
Tel-Hai College

This paper explores the semantics and pragmatics of the Hebrew word shahid (שהיד). Because this word was borrowed from Arabic, its meaning is compared to that of Arabic shahīd (شهيد) ‘roughly, martyr.’ Using corpus analysis and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method, the meaning of the Hebrew loan word is explicated, and its explication is compared to that of Arabic shahīd. The two explications demonstrate that the differences between the two words are greater than the similarities. Consequently, when Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs use the words interchangeably, intercultural miscommunication is highly likely to occur.

Publication history

Date received: 29 January 2024

Date accepted: 21 May 2024

Published online: 16 January 2025

Table of contents

On October 15, 2023, Israeli news reported that an Israeli Arab flight attendant working for the Israeli airline El Al was fired. One Hebrew news article explained that the reason for this was that she had posted on social media the Arabic counterpart of the following Hebrew sentence:

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