Are Hebrew "Qoheleth" and Latin "collate" in any way related?

Question

The two words are more similar in sound and meaning that the Latin "conferre". Not knowing Latin I would like a brief explanation of how "collate" comes from "conferre."

Answer 1

It's pure coincidence. The base word is fero, ferre ("I bring, to bring"), but in the past tense it's tuli ("I brought") and the past participle is latus ("brought").

If the word looks a bit weird, it's because two stems merged. We have a similar word in English that that happened to: the verb 'go', which is formed from 'go' in the present tense but from 'went' in the past tense.

Conferre is this word with the prefix con- ("together") attached to it. Before certain letters, the -n- will assimilate and change into the following letter. L is one of those, so before latus, the con- changes to col-.

The principle parts for this word is constructed in the same way as the base:

confero, conferre, contuli, collatus

Note that the assimilation is a historical process, and you will also see conlatus represented in certain authors.

Moreover, the English collate is further represented by the noun collation, which is directly from the Latin collatio, collationis (or with con- in some authors). And that final -e in collate is typical of dropped Latin endings (compare: iratus -> irate; marinus -> marine). Whereas that final -e is missing from Hebrew borrowings (think hanukkah, not hanukke).

Meanwhile, the Hebrew qoheleth isn't even a verb, like collate is, but a noun meaning something like "one who assembles" or "one who speaks before the assembly". The root word there is QHL. If it were borrowed in English, it would have looked very similar to the actual Hebrew word, as most Hebrew borrowings are.

Answer 2

To expand a bit more on cmw's entirely correct answer: ferō in Latin is what's called a suppletive verb. It's a verb that's taken some of its forms from one root, and some of its forms from another root; these usually result from defective verbs (verbs that are missing some of their forms) when they're used commonly enough that those forms are needed.

English has a few of these, like how there are no past-tense forms of the root "go". But since we use the verb "go" so often, people made do with the past tense of "wend" (as in "wend your way") to fill in the gaps, and so now we say "he goes" but "she went". That's also why "be", "is", and "was" look so different from each other: they were originally different verbs!

In Latin, ferō "bear" had no commonly-used past-tense forms, so the past forms of tollō "support" were used instead: originally tulī and tlātus. Then at some point in the history of Latin, tl simplified to l, and it became lātus. When the prefix con- "together" was stuck onto this, it assimilated: con-lātus > collātus (compare how in- + legible becomes illegible).

Since QHL is also a fairly well-attested Semitic root, I see no way this could have been borrowed from one language to another. It's possible one form influenced another in translation at some point—"I'm translating the Latin word collātiō into Hebrew, why not use the Hebrew word that sounds kind of like collātio"—but this isn't the same as being related. And the meanings are different enough that I wouldn't expect this sort of translation (technically called a "phono-semantic matching") to have happened except in odd edge cases where their meanings happen to align.