Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

 Herman Meester  wrote, quoting first:

2006/5/21, tladatsi at charter.net  >  > Even if QNH did refer to Cannabis, 
why would the Greeks need to borrow a  > word from a foreign language for a 
plant they were well acquainted with?  > When Herodotus (450 BCE) and 
Dioskarides (70 CE) refer to Kannabis, Hebrew  > was already a dying 
language.  >    Whence this sweeping supposition? If Hebrew had been "dying" 
as early as 450  BCE, or even only 70 CE, why did it continue to develop into 
the Hebrew we  have in a.o. the Mishna, midrash collections, etc.? The latter 
form of  Hebrew is clearly a language that has developed as a result of being 
spoken  (even if it had not been, languages mainly used for writing aren't 
dead  languages at all).  The fact that some late-biblical texts such as 
Daniel or Ezra are (partly)  in Aramaic, only points to the bilingual nature 
of those editing it. Qohelet  is a late work too, judging language and 
content, and it's Hebrew. Ben Sira  wrote in Hebrew in Hellenistic times, 
centuries after
 450 BCE; and so on.  The fact that Hebrew continued to develop 
syntactically, semantically, and  phonologically all this time up to late 
Antiquity has been well documented  by modern linguists. It has to be pointed 
out that Modern Hebrew is,  syntactically, a continuation of the form of 
Hebrew found in Mishna,Tosefta,  midrashim etc., not of B-Hebrew.    Herman,  
Rotterdam "

 

  While Herman is broadly correct above, I would like to correct

  the last sentence:

  

 Modern Hebrew is based on Biblical, Mishnaic, Rabbinical, and

 other components. By and large it maintains the Biblical

 language, syntactically and otherwise, much more than the

 Mishnaic forms. Just two examples:

 the modern language maintains the -im endings for the Masculine

 plural, rather than Mishnaic  -in. Lexically the modern use 

 prefers biblical nouns like Shemesh or 'Etz where Mishnaic

 equivalents such as H(.)ama or Ilan exist. The latter are used

 more in literary or festive contexts.

 

 It needs to be added that modern Hebrew would not be

 recognizable to a Hebrew speaker from the 8th BCE century,

 unless perhaps such a speaker had a pocket transistor= 

 translator available, and, further, had a pocket to store it

 in.

 

 Uri

   

 

 


                
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>From peter AT qaya.org  Sun May 21 16:33:07 2006
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Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 21:33:03 +0100
From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
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Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] QNH-BSM
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On 21/05/2006 01:04, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> On 5/20/06, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>   
>> How about Greek KANNA and KANWN (W = omega; cf English "cane" and
>> "canon") from Hebrew QANEH, or at least from its Semitic cognates? ...
>>     
>
> The word qaneh and its cognates has only one /n/ in the word. ...

I know. But Greek loans from Semitic languages do not always preserve 
single and double consonants, as is clear for example from Hebrew names 
in LXX. An example that comes to mind immediately is Hebrew RIBQAH > 
Greek REBEKKA. Anyway, the Greek word appears as KANH (h=eta) as well as 
KANNA, and in the apparent derivative KANWN in which the second N is 
probably a suffix, and so the doubling of the N is probably a change 
within Greek. Also, this etymological link is not something speculative 
and certainly not something which derives from cannabis lovers, but is 
clearly stated in reputable dictionaries, e.g. American Heritage, see 
http://www.answers.com/cane&r=67, cf. also the Online Etymology 
Dictionary at 
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=cane&searchmode=none, also 
BDB s.v. QANEH. If you want to disprove this etymology, you will need to 
find a convincing reason why the same thing was called QANEH in Hebrew 
and KANH in Greek if there was no etymological link.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/