[b-hebrew] isaac on malk-at, xat-at
Nir cohen - Prof. Mat.
nir at ccet.ufrn.br
Mon Jan 10 12:50:16 EST 2011
isaac,
i agree that the feminine article "at" was involved, but i think only in a partial way. as to the first case, melek-malkah, i suggest a two-stage process.
stage 1: the feminine article "at" (you) as a suffix was an ancient way of forming the feminine form of an
object: melek--> malkat. i believe this was the rule in accadian (tihamat, ashtoret etc). as feminine objects
were originally considered, as a rule, somebody's possession, this became the "smichut form" in hebrew.
stage 2: the non-smichut form ending -ah was (perhaps later on) reserved for feminine objects in their own right , but
this later process "-at--> -ah" was no more related to the word "at".
as to xata-->xatat, this is a different story, since xatat (although feminine) is not just "feminine xet". actually it is a case of the
ending "ut" which implies an abstract noun, just like shalem-->shlemut, sefer--> sifrut, as a rule only in the singular. here, the explanation
"sifrut<--sefer+at" makes no sense. instead, i suggest "sifrut<--sefer+heiot". once "-ut" was established as a general suffix, and assuming
a vowel ending "a" for the irregular root "xet" (which ends with aleph), the diphthong "au" simplified to "a".
i think that a similar construction with the auxiliary verb "to be" can be attested in many languages.
nir cohen
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 20:20:54 -0500, Isaac Fried wrote
> Seems to me: XATAT (חטאת) = XAT-AT (חטא-את).
> Similarly: MALKAT (מלכת) = MALK-AT (מלך-את), *KANARIYT (כנרית) = KANAR-HIY)-AT (כנר-היא-את), etc.
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
> On Jan 6, 2011, at 11:06 AM, Nir cohen - Prof. Mat. wrote:
> though isaak might claim otherwise. here one should also consider xet-xata)t (vaikra 16:3): xet is the original word and xata)t (sacrifice) is the derived one
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