Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 04/01/2007 00:41, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> ... As for TW, the
> word is spelled with a qamats -- tɔv.  This could be a case where the word is
> derived from a two letter root *taw, compare *yad > yɔd except in construct.
> In such a case, the verb is too derived from the word.  ... The  word vɔv 
> also has a qamats, has
> no verb, and is not recognized by Fox as an isolated noun so in this case I
> guess this is a word peculiar to Hebrew and  Aramaic, and perhaps a loan
> word from a foreign language.
>
>   
Thank you for your reply. But in fact there is good reason to assume 
that these two words are common at least to NW Semitic - because they 
are letter names! The use of a the letter vav looking like a hook and 
the letter tav looking like a mark or cross goes back to the 
proto-Canaanite script (indeed the latter is found as early as Wadi 
el-Hol, around 1800 BCE), and was also borrowed into Greek - along with 
the letter name tau, also originally wau which became known later as 
digamma. This implies that these two words were used by Semites rather 
early, probably around 2000 BCE when the alphabet was invented on the 
acrophonic principle.

> I am looking for examples of other nouns of the same form as cav derived from
> verbal roots as Karl suggests is the case with cav. ...

I don't think you will find any others, at least in biblical Hebrew. I 
looked at all 22 possible two consonant words ending in consonantal vav, 
and listed them almost all.

...
> 2) There should be some clear example of the verb used in conjunction with
> the noun, like we have in taw.  This does not have to involve nouns ending
> with waw, but rather show a pattern where, for example, verbs with medial
> W have a two letter derived nouns from the first and last letters of the 
> verbal
> root. ...

But this is not the hypothesis! The hypothesis a noun of the form XY (X 
and Y here being unknowns) derived from a "lamed-he" type verb XYH. And 
we have an example simply by reading XY and XYH as transliterations, and 
by understanding the Hebrew verb for "live" to be the attested form XYH 
rather than the conjectural XWH. That is certainly a well attested 
pairing with a clear semantic link.

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