Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rochelle Altman <willaa AT netvision.net.il>]

Thank you, Yitzhak,

You have saved me the nuisance of digging out notebooks from the late 
1950's-early 1960's and demonstrated that the word is a loan word, but not 
Hebrew in origin. And that is the point, not that it became a word in Hebrew.

Loan words do not fit the basic patterns of word formation in a given 
language. Further, accounting for lost consonants (and vowels) cannot 
always be traced to a linguistic "law." With borrowed words, a great deal 
depends upon where and when the borrowed word was heard and recorded in the 
symbol set of the recipient language. (For pertinent examples of how words 
are recorded as they are heard, see John DeFrancis, Visible Speech: The 
Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: Hawaii UP, 1989)

Thanks again,

Rochelle

> > On 16 Jul 2006 at 21:42, Revdpickrel AT wmconnect.com wrote:
> >
> > > I agree 100 percent that Leviathan illustration is a metaphor, no 
> question
> > > about that.  He certainly is not a great sea monster.  Leviathan 
> means "one who
> > > dwell among the sea of humanity," not the seas where monsters live.
> >
> > What's your source for this definition?  Rochelle has said several 
> times that it's
> > not a Hebrew word and nobody has challenged that, so I assume she's 
> correct,
> > plus it doesn't look like a Hebrew word.  Do we know what language it is?
> > Seems to me we'd need to know that in order to nail down such a specific
> > definition.
>
> How do you define a Hebrew word?  Are $or "ox", qeren "horn", or yayin "wine"
> Hebrew words?  For all of these, linguists seem to believe that the words were
> borrowed at an earlier stage of Semitic, perhaps from an Indo-European
> language, although the evidence is probably not sufficient for a definite
> conclusion.  Other examples from other languages could be suggested,
> including Sumerian and Akkadian.  The word "peten" which I mentioned in the
> context of this thread appears to be a borrowing from Aramaic
> ("pattana"), since
> that would explain the middle consonant "t" where other apparent cognates have
> a "th" (thus, suggesting Hebrew should have had a "$").  Does any of this mean
> that these words are not Hebrew?  The word "Leviathan" has its cognate in
> Ugaritic "ltn" ("lotan"?).  The difference in the two consonants of the words
> would seem to suggest that neither borrowed from the other, as there is no
> way to explain the loss of these consonants.  It would seem most logical to
> reconstruct them both to a word in a parent language ("Northwest Semitic"?)
> and that word may have been borrowed.  Does that make it any less a Hebrew
> word than "yayin" which may have been borrowed at the Northwest Semitic
> stage?  Possible etymological definitions include basing the word on the root
> l-w-y ("to surround") and also as comparable or a borrowing from Assyrian
> lawuta:nu "servant".  The first would definitely seem to correspond with the
> imagery of Leviathan as a "coiling" snake.
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
> http://toldot.blogspot.com