Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

>In my copy of Larry Mitchel : Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (1984), "real
>words" are not grouped by root and they are displayed following their own
>frequency.

what i remember from mitchell are occasional "verbs" vocalized as a
qal/root that don't exist. this can be difficult and misleading for
beginning students.

e.g., check a form like *naba', or *tsava. [i don't have a copy of the book
anymore.] 
besides the questions of giving meaning for non-existant words and the
quality of his glosses, does mitchell's frequency for that word include the
one binyan or all binyanim together? 

for nibba' (the correct form for  'prophesied') the frequency should read
87. 
for hitnabba' the frequency should read 28. 
for *naba' the frequency should be 0 (i.e., not listed at all). 

pedagogically, i wonder what the beginning student is supposed to learn
from *naba'? from *shamad? good intermediate students may be able to
correctly form the proposed binyan and discard fictitious words. but i've
also seen more than one student mislead by studying this way. ]  [a
possible related noun example: i think a student last year tried to use Hai
as 'animal' (Hayya='animal') based on studying this list, though i may be
mistaken in attribution.]

other statistics as a test:
nishmad should be 21
hishmid 69
'ibbed 41
he'evid 26
avad 117

so, are the real words listed in mitchell or are "*root-words" listed in
mitchell? 

i'd be happy to correct my memory of mitchell.

braxot 
randall buth