From Dog To Rabies
It goes without saying that Hebrew is an ancient language and that many of the words that were used to identify certain ailments were derived from perceived causation.
For instance, the word for rabies in Hebrew is kalevet (כַּלֶּבֶת). It derives from dog – kelev (כֶּלֶב) – which seems sensible enough. So, rabies is literally doggish or doggified; it’s a modifier derived from the dog’s rabid behavior. (Incidentally, the name Caleb also derives from dog; according to a professor of mine, Caleb used to be Kalev-El or “dog of God” [as in, loyal and devoted]).
Deriving the word for rabies from dog makes complete sense; rabies was probably understood in terms of the manifestation of rabid symptoms most commonly observed in the typical foaming mad dog.
However, this classification of rabies as doggish limits the scope of rabies to being simply a canine phenomenon. In this scope, it shows that other rabid animals are left out altogether. A rabid bat becomes a doggish bat and so on.
It’s clearly a physical definition; you see the foaming dog and you assume that something inherent in the dog causes rabies.
If we, however, take the word rabies and look at how its origin, a slightly different worldview emerges. Rabies comes from the latin verb rabere and means “to be maddened”. The etymology of rabies suggests a mental, at any rate a non-physical, definition of what it is to be rabid. The word doesn’t focus on where the rabies comes from so much as the mental state of the inflicted. The definition is pan-applicable; any thing can be rabid so long as it displays a set of symptoms conforming to “to be maddened”.
Since Latin is a relatively much younger language than Hebrew, it seems plausible that the newer rabere suggests a different and more accurate understanding of what it is to be inflicted with rabies than the older kalevet. Instead of associating an apparent causal relationship between dog-rabies, the Latin suggests an internal affliction associated with symptoms.
This isn’t to suggest any kind of judgment of the two cultures’ understanding of the world, it’s merely to illustrate a perceptive difference highlighted in the linguistic definition of a disease and its cause.