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  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] : CV syllables, was music in Hebrew
  • Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 09:21:29 -0500

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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  • Re: [b-hebrew] : CV syllables, was music in Hebrew, Karl Randolph, 02/15/2006

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