Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT ozemail.com.au> =====
>David, you ask a good question. Basically I already tried,
>independently, to answer it. I see BRK as a case of polysemy, divergent
>senses of the same word, rather than homonymy, words of different origin
>which happen to coincide in form. But maybe you have further
>perspectives from your lexicographical work in Hebrew and in other
>languages. Does it actually make a practical difference whether we have
>polysemy or homonymy? And is there a way to tell which is happening?

I'm not sure how a linguist would make the distinction (perhaps by how native 
speakers understand the words to be related; I think in most cases I can 
recognize whether two English words look or sound alike because they're 
actually related or not). One major tool used by philologists (who still seem 
to produce most of the BH dictionaries) is to compare with other Semitic 
languages. Often homonymous roots in Hebrew seem to result from the loss of a 
consonant. So, if we can find the roots in a language like Arabic, which 
retains more of the proto-semitic consonants, we can sometimes find that two 
consonants have collapsed in Hebrew to produce homonymy. Of course, lining up 
corresponding roots in different languages has its own set of problems. But 
often when you find homonymous roots in HALOT (generally more frequently than 
in BDB), they're being traced back to different proto-semitic radicals.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics