Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Elaine:

A problem with trying to evaluate lingistic roots is that there is too little 
information to make a definitive statement. Some words are pretty clear, the 
date of authorship as well as the context argue for them to be loan words 
into Hebrew, but not all.

For example, even a document as short as the Gezer calendar has at least one 
lexeme not found in Tanakh, (CD  [‘atsad] which I think may have meant “to 
ret”, a common term in those days of making linen out of flax. If a word that 
common in the language is missing from Tanakh, how many other common spoken 
terms that legitimately were in the language are known today only from 
cognate languages or as loan words into other languages?

As for BDB, I think they were philosophical anti-Semites. When a word is 
found in both Biblical Hebrew and another language, they seem to make the 
presupposition that the word is a loan word into Hebrew. Who can say so, or 
if it were the other way around? This is particularly true of Greek, which 
has several words that historically presumably entered their language through 
Semitic influences, but what about the other languages as well?

Karl W. Randolph.


----- Original Message -----
From: Elaine Keown <elaine_keown AT yahoo.com>

>        Elaine Keown
>        central Texas
> 
> Hi,
> 
> If you look at the standard (but quite old)
> dictionary, Brown-Driver-Briggs, you will find
> Aramaic, Persian, Akkadian, Tamil or Malayalam, Greek,
> Egyptian and probably various others.  
> 
> I would guess that the Aramaic and Persian loanwords
> are the most numerous---Elaine
-- 
__________________________________________________________
Sign-up for your own personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup

Search Smarter - get the new eXact Search Bar for free!
http://www.exactsearchbar.com/