Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 05/01/2007 09:35, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

> ... Furthermore, all letters appear to be isolated
> nouns that have no independent verbs of the root or that were derived from
> verbal roots. ...

Do you need to "learn" something here? Both )LP and LMD are well 
attested verbal roots meaning "learn". BDB derives )ELEP "cattle" from 
the former root, and the letter name alef is certainly from "cattle". 
Similarly the letter name lamed seems to come from a word meaning 
"ox-goad", Hebrew MAL:MED, which can easily be derived from the verbal 
root LMD. Samekh "pillar" is also rather obviously derivable from the 
verb SMK "support". I'm not sure about the others, but these three 
apparent counter-examples show that your "all" is not accurate. So this 
would put paid to any argument that the letter names are all loan words.

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