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Originally Posted by cohen.izzy  However, the original meaning of "sabotage" was to go on strike, that is, to stop working. I believe it is derived from Hebrew shin-bet-tof with the sense of treating a workday as if it were the Sabbath. |
No Hebrew connection here. It comes from the French: a "sabot" was a wooden shoe worn by peasants, and "sabotage" the clattering noise made by walking in these shoes. It then came to mean any awful noise, a cacophany, and was commonly applied to badly-played music; that gave it the meaning of "to bungle".
It then came to be applied to labour disputes, although it's not exactly clear how. The oft-repeated story that strikers threw their sabots into the machinery to disable it appears to be untrue: probably, they either intentionally bungled their work, or stood on the picket-line making a cacophanous noise, so that no work could be done.
By the way, you can't do language research simply by looking at similar words in different languages and assuming they must be related. You have to go through all the literary works you can find and trace the meaning of the word backwards in time. Unless you can show a definite evolution through time from "shin-bet-tof" to "sabotage", you won't be able to prove anything. In this case, you'd have to show exactly when and how the vowels "a" and "o" were inserted into the consonant template you provide, and to produce documentary evidence that the word was in use with the meaning you claim some time before about the 13th century, when "sabot" first appeared in French.
However, there is evidence that "sabot" might be derived from an Arabic word for something like "old shoe". If so, that seems to be the only Semitic connection here.