[b-hebrew] Genesis 31: 47 - Suffix -UT
David Kummerow
farmerjoeblo at hotmail.com
Wed Nov 28 17:47:53 EST 2007
Hi Isaac,
Who said anything about "mechanical translation"? I thought we were
attempting a semantic analysis here with this discussion? If so, BH
melek and malkut equate semantically, or overlap semantically, with
English "king" and "kingdom" respectively. The -ut suffix is joined to
malk-, but crucially not to address the addressee and simultaneously
point out some third-person referent. If anything, I would say that your
own approach is far too "mechanical" in finding personal pronouns in
every nook and cranny. Just because there is a 'u' and a 't' does not
mean that we have to see a morphological makeup of one or two personal
pronouns, only that we have here two phonemes, /t/ and /u/, which,
unsurprisingly due to their phonemic status, are found in some personal
pronouns also many, many other words and morphemes in BH.
Regards,
David Kummerow.
> Pere,
>
> The flow chart should go, methinks, this way
>
> ----------> MELEK, king
>
> MLK, root
> ----------> MALKUT, kingdom, kingship
>
> Now, matters become befogged because we jump from one language to
> another and think that by mechanical translation we achieve
> understanding. To understand the Hebrew you need to explain to yourself
> what MELEK and MALKUT mean without using the English equivalents, only
> the root MLK.
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
>
>
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