BEING BORN IN NEO-ARAMAIC 1 Samuel Fox 1.0. Being Born in English The English expression ‘to be born’ is the passive form of the verb ‘to bear’, which has a general meaning ‘to carry’ and a special sense ‘to give birth to’. The use of the passive of the verb ‘to bear’ in this meaning is very old in the Germanic languages and can already be found in Gothic. 2 However, the connection between ‘to bear’ and ‘to be born’ is nowadays hardly felt in English and the Oxford English Dictionary (1971, 1003) remarks that “the phrase to be born has become virtually an intransitive verb.” The result is that ‘to be born’ now usually refers specifically to emerging from the womb and is no longer a special sense of a more general verb. In more formal style, the passive can still refer to carrying, but when it has this sense an alternate form spelled with a final -e is now used to distinguish it from the more usual meaning. On the other hand, ‘to be born’ is frequently used in a metaphorical sense, and from its basic meaning it has been generalised to all kinds of beginnings. We can say ‘a star is born’, whether we are 1 Thanks to Michael Chyet for valuable and fascinating discussion, to Hezy Mutzafi for data on Modern Mandaic, and to Simon Hopkins for many important corrections and suggestions. And remaining errors are, of course, my own. 2 An example is found in Wulfilas’ translation of the Bible in Luke 1.35.