Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 1/4/07, Peter Kirk wrote:

> 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.

Yes, even if they are loan words, they're probably common to NW
Semitic.  However, one must be careful about the use of letter names.
We know the alphabet existed from early on.  We do not know the
original letter names.  For example, the letter Zayin is called "zeta" in
Greek, perhaps from *zayt.  Furthermore, all letters appear to be isolated
nouns that have no independent verbs of the root or that were derived from
verbal roots.  The appearance of tau/wau among these suggests a similar
situation for these words as well.  The hypothesis claimed by Karl is that
"cav" "is also a legitimate noun derivation from CWH."  In this case, CWH
points to a verbal root.  Note the difficulty in proving this claim of
derivation
as opposed to proving that a word like miqdɔ$ is a noun derived from the
verbal root QD$, in a "legitimate noun derivation."

> > 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.

"The same form" is ambiguous and I don't intend to suggest the noun must
end in waw.

> > 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.

There are several problems.  First CWH is not attested as a Qal the way that
XYH is, and also that the above noun appears to be derived from the Qal
participle, so that the attestation of a Qal appears to be significant to our
ability to suggest this as a legitimate noun derivation.  Also, I hope you 
will
agree that the He in the root may be more accurately represented from the
point of view of morphology by a Yod, that is CWY and XYY, the He being a
secondary development in some verbal conjugations.  As such, in XYY we
do not know whether the root is reproduced in the noun from the first and
second root letters, or the first and third, in which case the legitimate noun
that was supposed to be derived from CWH would have been CY.

In addition to this point, which is being argued at length here, note
that I gave
additional reasons why CW is probably not an ancient Hebrew word meaning
"command" or "order".

Yitzhak Sapir