Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 11/12/06, JP vd Giessen (FOL) <janpieter AT giessen.fol.nl> wrote:
> I always thought anoki was an Egyptian loanword (see also Legend
> of the Jews:
> http://search.ldslibrary.com/3821135) but maybe I'm wrong.

The Hebrew )anoki is the first person pronoun and it is not a
borrowed word from Egyptian.  Rather, Egyptian and Hebrew,
along with Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Moabite, and
Canaanite all had cognate first person pronouns.  The Afroasiatic
pronoun is reconstructed as: )ana:ku.  -a:ku is the first person
suffix, and in Central Semitic (including most dialects of Arabic),
this -k- evolved to -t-.  Later in Canaanite, the (now) -tu suffix
became the familiar -ti of the first person conjugations.  The -o-
in the middle of this word is the result of the Canaanite shift
a: > o.  See also here for comments on )ani and )anoki
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2002-September/003222.html
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2002-September/003232.html
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2002-September/003273.html
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2002-September/003275.html

Yitzhak Sapir