Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Herman:

My reticence for using Arabic is purely from the 
fact that it is so much later. I think that 
religion and politics has no role in that.

Furthermore, it is unnecessary, even irrelevant, in  
a purely descriptive portrayal of Biblical Hebrew. 
It's only when one asks "Why?" that a study of 
cognate languages comes into its own. 

When God mixed up the languages at Babel, the 
record doesn't say how he mixed them up. Some he 
mixed up quite a bit, others he mixed up less, and 
there is no reason why he wouldn't mix up some in 
similar ways, in families, so to speak. So without 
a history indicating common ancestry, as with for 
example the Germanic tribes, can we insist on 
claiming a common source?

In other words, the reason there's no proto-Semitic 
attested to in the historical record is because 
there never was one?

No, I don't reject out of hand using Arabic to help 
in the study of Hebrew, I just don't think it is an 
important source of information. 

Karl W. Randolph.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "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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