Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Liz,

> Akkadian is derived from Sumerian and
> that Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphs vie for the status of oldest
> written language.

My guess is that Hebrew (or Semitic, for this matter) is an artificial
grammatical structure overlaid on the existing natural ("mumbling")
language.

> Second, many Hebrew roots have only two letters, qm, b', lk, and these
> are the most common. It is easy to see how these could have started out
> as grunts.

No argument about this. The issue is the language as we know it, with very
strict three-letter roots (two-letter ones received waw, hey, ayn-ayn, etc).
And that language strongly seems based on certain arbitrary assumptions,
foremost--the fixed root length.

But, again and again, what I see as the biggest question is that convention
of specifically three-"letter" roots predates the concept of letter. At the
time when the root length was fixed as three letters, the concept of letter
did not exist yet.

Vadim Cherny