Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George F Somsel <gfsomsel AT juno.com>]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:24:55 +0200 "Vadim Cherny"
<vadim_lv AT center-tv.net> writes:
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________

Actually, Accadian is NOT derived from Sumerian.  The two languages are
not even in the same family.  What Accadiaan got from Sumerian was it
syllabary.

george
gfsomsel
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