Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

>> I don't think that the relationship between paal and piel is difficult at
> all, if only we accept an obvious thing about piel, the notion of
intensity.
>
> That’s just the problem—only very very rarely can intensity be recognized
from the context.

> I suspect that the Piel, if it existed, would have had clear contextual
clues so that the reader would recognize it without vower points.

> So what are the contextual clues that point to a Piel?

In my opinion, described in the earlier post, piel is just a forceful
pronunciation of paal, like in command verbs:

cathAv - cath:A:v - cath:Ev - c'th:Ev - c(i)th:Ev - c(i)tEv

What did the ancients mean by this forceful pronunciation? I don't know.
Sometimes the idea of intensity is obvious. In most cases, some kind of
intensity might be inferred. In some cases, paal existed only in piel
pronunciation. So the semantical shades are many.

What seems clear, however, is morphology: piel is not an arbitrary
constructed binyan, but paal twisted by forceful pronunciation. And that
forcefulness is due to semantics.

Vadim Cherny