Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Herman Meester <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

What Uri says is right.
A dislike, often observed, of using Arabic as a means to understand
biblical Hebrew better, in my view, is (unfortunately) not always
without political or religious bias. Languages, in their syntax,
morphology and phonology, have nothing to do with politics or
religion. Classical Arabic is not itself Proto-central-Semitic, but
many of the features of the latter construct are still there in
Arabic, too. The fact that Arabic, unlike Hebrew, conserved case
endings and a.o the subjunctive in the verb says a lot.

Herman


2006/2/14, Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>:
> Bryant J. Williams III   wrote, inter alia:
>
>   "... but Arabic is too late
> to be of any help in discerning the workings of the Hebrew language"...
>
>    This statement does not to take into account that classical Arabic, 
> though attested in writing only in the 7th century CE, has retained many 
> features of an early Semitic language that eventually  evolved into various 
> branches ; this early linguistic ancestor is known as Proto - Semitic.
>
>      Just two examples which I may have mentioned on this list before:
>
>       Fem. Single endings in biblical Heb. lost its 'T', but  this letter 
> exists in declensions  -- Dodah - Dodati etc.
>
>        The so called L"H verbs in biblical Heb. actually had 'Y" as the 
> final consonant, as can be seen in most conjugations of such verbs. This 
> can be easily observed in similar verbs in Arabic.
>
>       Arabic is essential for a full understanding of various features of 
> Hebrew.
>
>       Uri
>
>
>
>
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