Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 15/11/2006 20:37, David Kummerow wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> If were are talking about grammaticalisation here, we should not need to 
> EXPECT grammatical agreement. If `abdeka were a grammaticalised polite 
> pronoun, it should be analysable pretty much solely as a polite pronoun, 
> i.e. [`abdeka] = polite 1st person polite pronoun, rather than [[`ebed] 
> = "servant" + [ka] = 2ms] = polite 1st person noun phrase reference. Do 
> you see the difference? The question is: to what extent is `abdeka 
> grammaticalised, or, put another way, synchronically analysable? I think 
> in the minds of speakers it was still thought of in its constituent parts.
>
>   
Thank you for continuing to help me here. Yes, you may be right about 
`abdeka, and certainly about "your humble servant", that they are 
analysable. But I am far from sure that this is not true of Turkish 
"bendeniz", especially since the variant "bendeleri" is found, and these 
forms are very clearly the second and third person plural possessed form 
of a known noun "bende". Yet you put forward the Turkish as an example. 
So I remain a bit confused about the criteria.

But does it matter? It is less important to decide whether certain 
Hebrew forms fit someone's rather unclear (at least to me) definitions 
and theories than to decide what actually happens in Hebrew.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
Blog:    http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/