Pesach
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Root
pesa
to pass, to pass by, to go past, to swerve aside; kupesana, to pass one another without meeting
Pesach descends from Shona kupesa, to pass by, to go past
- Confidence
- 72/100
- Root language
- Shona
- Descent begins
- PesachEnglish
The consensus position
Mainstream comparative Semitics derives Pesach from the Hebrew verb pasaḥ 'to pass over, spare' or 'to limp', with cognates in Aramaic pisḥā and Arabic fasaḫa, and treats the festival name as either genuinely from that root or a pre-Israelite pastoral term reanalysed by the wordplay of Exodus 12:27. Shona Pasika is universally analysed as a mission-era loan from Latin and Portuguese pascha.
The working behind this.
The full descent — 7 links from the attested form down to the root — the segment-by-segment correspondences, the phonological breakdown and the case for the derivation are behind an account.
An account opens 10 entries in full, free.
Elsewhere in the corpus
- בראbara (kubara)to beget, to bring forth, to give birth; in Karanga and Ndau craft use also to pare or hollow out
- Edenhudendeabundance, plenty, superfluity; from -dende, gourd or large calabash
- Nekevahnengovenotch, grooved cut; one bearing a notched or bored thing (variant nhengove)
- ZakhárZikirato know thoroughly, to recognise, to be acquainted with, to hold in mind (applicative of -zika / -ziva, to know)
- ChavahHuvhemoon, beauty, height, the deified feminine; reduced stem Vhe
- Megiddogudurato knock off, to break off, to dislodge a piece