Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <vadim_lv AT center-tv.net>]

> It is indeed quite likely that sometime in the misty prehistory of the
> Afro-Asiatic languages, before the split between Semitic, Berber and
> Egyptian (for these groups share the triliteral root structure), many
> roots were composed from some kind of biliteral root plus a suffix
> giving a more precise semantic - perhaps much as Greek, Latin, Russian
> verbs etc are commonly made up of an often monosyllabic root with a
> prefix giving a more precise semantic.

What makes the third radical in, say, pr-derived roots a suffix? Suffix is
something employed across the words with the same meaning. But the same
radical in pr and nsh roots hardly relates exactly the same meaning. Third
radicals are no suffixes.
Besides, if they were suffixes, a highly developed morphological device,
then the addition was deliberate. In any case, the Semitic morphology is
quite beyond the cavemen and cavewomen. To me, the language seems slowly
adapted to the people, from picto- to logograms to alphabet.

The logograms demonstrate that people knew the words before they knew
letters (alphabet). But in the root system, they had to know the letters
first in order to compose the roots and words. How could anyone explain this
on the natural-language grounds?

Vadim Cherny