Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 8/2/06, Charles Meadows wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have seen some interesting sounding titles by Joshua Blau [...] and I am
> not proficient in modern Hebrew!
>
> I have been studying the relationship of Hebrew to Arabic and Aramaic -
> particularly in terms of common derivation from an original protosemitic
> language or group of dialects.  I have Gesenius, Jouon/Muraoka, Waltke,
> vander Merwe, Berstrasser, and Kaltner (Beyond Babel) among others.
>
> Would anyone here recommend anything by Blau?
>
> Additionally are there any other recommended semitics books?  Moscati perhaps?

The following (English) articles by Blau have been useful to me:
"The Parallel Development of the Feminine Ending -at in Semitic Languages"
Hebrew Union College Annual (HUCA) 51 (1980), p. 17-28.
"Short Philological Notes on the Inscription of Me$a(", Maarav 2/2 (1979-80),
p. 143-157.

Also, I found useful an Hebrew article of Blau's refuting Rendsburg's
suggestion
that the Hebrew of the Bible has dual forms.

Also useful in terms of Semitics reconstruction were a few articles by Joshua
Fox and the various Encyclopedia entries in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the
World's Ancient Languages.  There is also a book "The Semitic Languages" ed
Robert Hetzron that I haven't been able to get a hold of.  A nice
internet piece is
John Huehnergard's review of Proto-Semitic at 
http://www.bartleby.com/61/10.html

You might want to look up some of the above authors in RAMBI:
http://libnet.ac.il/~libnet/rmb/

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com