[b-hebrew] What piel stands for

Vadim Cherny VadimCherny at mail.ru
Fri Apr 29 12:36:29 EDT 2005


In my opinion, there is no ambiguity whatsoever. Just think how piel
appeared. For millennia it was indistinguishable from paal. Who would use
indistinguishable grammatical form? I think, piel is the same old paal, but
pronounced forcefully to reflect the intense meaning.
This forceful pronunciation of paal created piel:

cathAv - cathAav (intonational accent) - caththAav - c'ththEv (I'm not sure
of English analogy, but this phonology is widespread in Russian: verb "go"
poshiol becomes p'shshiool in command) - c(i)tev

In other words, piel is not a real form, but command pronunciation of paal.

Vadim Cherny

> As for recognizing the difference between a Qal and Piel, I have yet to
see a well defined way that all can agree to to recognize it from the
context. It seems that even the top scholars disagree on what a Piel stands
for.

> Karl W. Randolph.





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