Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 17/08/2004 15:26, Jason Hare wrote:

> Trevor & Liz,
>
> Do we have any records of the Hittite language that
> the original question regarded? Liz gave two examples,
> /pardes/ and /dat/, of loan words from Persian. Do we
> have evidence of other specific Indo-European
> languages that might have left an influence on early
> Hebrew?
>  

There are surviving Hittite texts, which could be a good source of data 
on any such early loans. But I don't have more data on such loans.

As for genetic affiliations, they are likely to be very early, long 
before written texts in any language. You might like to look at the 
Nostratic hypothesis of a common root for all the world's languages 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic). There are also people who try 
to derive Indo-European languages from early Hebrew, but they are well 
outside the linguistic mainstream.


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/