What word is translated as “neighbour” in the New Testament, for instance in the story of the good Samaritan? What can you tell me about the meaning of this word?

Is “neighbour” an apt English word for this?

Plêsion is built on the root word, plêsios which, like the root for neighbor, means near. Translated in the Vulgate with proximus

Ah, so plesiosaur means near-lizard, a fact confirmed by the OED entry for plesiosaurus and the first cite for that word:

1821 W. D. CONYBEARE in Trans. Geol. Soc. 5 560 A skeleton of the animal in question..enabled us to assign to it its true place in the zoological order, and to designate it by an appropriate name. That of Plesiosaurus has been chosen, as expressing its near approach to the order Lacerta.

Interesting too that plesiosaur predates dinosaur by 20 years.

Thanks aldi.  That set me on a look up for plesio- words.  Thus plesiochronous, plesiomorphy, and a fun organism, Plesiomonas shigelloides.  Yich.

What word is translated as neighbour in Exodus 20:16 “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”

rea (transliterations are somewhat arbitrary, but the two root consonants are resh and ayin).  Hebrew is a bit out of my depth and there are others here much more adept at all this.  Lionello, RebWlm.  But the sense I have is that this word doesn’t mean so much “neighbor” in the literal, “next door” sense as “companion, friend.” Sometimes translated into Greek with philos (thus Philadelphia—brotherly love).

Presumably why the film was so called?

Fred Herzog - 27 March 2007 04:49 AM

Translated in the Vulgate with proximus

From a Latin dictionary:
propior -us genit. -oris , [nearer], in space or time (cf. prope); [more like; more closely connected; more suitable]. Superl. proximus (proxumus) -a -um, [very near, nearest]; in time, [next, following, or most recent]; in rank, etc., [next, next best; most like; most nearly connected]; m. pl. as subst. [near relations or close friends].

The fine points of Hebrew are way beyond me, i’m afraid. Being able to speak, read, and write everyday modern Hebrew is one thing. Biblical Hebrew is very much another. And so is what for want of a better word i wIll call “literary” Hebrew, which is heavy laden with Biblical and Talmudic allusions. I can read, or write, a technical report in a field in which I’m knowledgeable; on the other hand, Hebrew poetry beyond the nursery-rhyme level is mostly incomprehensible to me.
Re’a, which as Fred Herzog points out, is the Hebrew word rendered in Exodus 20:16 as “neighbour”, could just as well (perhaps better, in 21st-century English) be translated in that passage as “fellow-man”. The commandment doesn’t mean “don’t bear false witness against your friend” --- you mustn’t bear false witness against someone you don’t know from Adam, or against someone you loathe, either *. With words like that, context plays a very heavy role in defining the meaning. It’s the same in English, after all. “Fellow” can mean several quite different things, depending on context. That’s why automatic translators are so limited in their usefulness.

RebWlm is the man you want. I can help with terms like “soup-ladle”, “manganese dioxide”, “bank overdraft”.

*(actually, I’d rather leave that point for the rabbis to sort out)

FWIW in a Biblical context, in Dutch usually the word ‘naaste’ is used. The basic meaning is ‘person(s) near to you’ and ‘fellow-man’. This word is also the basis for the prefix ‘na-’ in ‘nabuur’ (older ‘nagebuur’) in which of course you may recognize ‘neighbour’.