Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 1/5/07, Peter Kirk wrote:
> 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.

I didn't say all letter names are all loan words.  I said tɔv and vɔv
are possibly
loan words, and even so, they were borrowed before the NWS stage.  After
this they probably functioned and were indistinguishable from other non-
loanwords.  As for the statement that all letter names are probably isolated
nouns, I take it back and say that letter names as a general rule appear to
be isolated nouns.  An isolated noun is not a loan word necessarily.  Rather,
it is a noun that is not connected to a verb and therefore can be analyzed in
linguistical studies according to comparative evidence.  If there is a
verb, it is
a minor verb that is apparently derived from the isolated noun and not the
other way around.  While lamed (see following discussion) appears to work
against this rule, the words tɔv and vɔv certainly seems to follow the general
framework -- the verb for tɔv appears to be derived from tɔv and I am not sure
what verb to expect for vɔv.

)alp is analyzed as an isolated noun meaning "ox, thousand" in Fox's study,
so any verb would be apparently derived from it.

lambda as the letter name probably originally was pronunced is also a
qatl form.  The Hebrew malmad- would seem to suggest how a noun
constructed from the verb would have looked like in Hebrew.  I agree
that lamed is the best example of a noun that is related to a verb, but
the fact remains that of the clearly identifiable letter names, most letter
names are basic words with no verb.  If we, however, ask what a
segholate of a final-y root would have looked like, we can find an example
in xaci (xcy) "half" (< *xicy according to HALOT) from xch.  HALOT also
claims this is a verb derived from the noun.  In this case, we should have
expected cavi (cvy) or something of the sort, not cav.

Samekh is problematic as the meaning of the letter name is unclear,
the corresponding letter in Greek is sigma (which involves both a k/g
interchange, and a change of the letter positions).

Yitzhak Sapir