Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Peter:

This is a case where I spoke too hastily before checking the history,
I had made an assumption based on the fact that modern Norwegian is
closer to Old English than either modern English or modern German.
Instead this is an example as to why to doubt the "fact" of different
roots because they show up in cognate languages.

The word in question is "to" which was claimed to be the same word but
used in different ways: as an indicator for the infinitive and as an
indicator of motion towards. In Norwegian (also Danish and Swedish),
the two are "å" and "til". I expected that if one were to look at Old
Norse, which was close enough to Anglo Saxon that speakers of the two
were mutually understandable, that he will find the same distinction.
But there is a paper trail of written English to verify or falsify my
expectation, and apparently, according to different sources, its use
as an indicator of the infinitive is a fragment of a Middle English
use of "to" that for the most part has dropped from use in Modern
English. Seeing as it apparently dates from Middle English and not
earlier, that dates it to after Old Norse and English diverged because
of the Norman invasion, and that's why the English and Norwegian are
different.

That paper trail does not exist for many of the postulated roots for
Hebrew, they exist only as speculation based on cognate languages and
much of that from much later when there could have been divergence
and/or cross loaning in the cognate languages. Furthermore, most of
those claimed homonyms have the same function when defined according
to action instead of form in semantic domains. It is for these two
reasons that I question the claims for Hebrew, defining according to
action having more weight in my considerations.

Karl W. Randolph.

On 3/25/07, Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org> wrote:
> Karl, it is interesting to see that you are finding fault with a study
> which takes two homonyms to be the same word because it has not made
> proper use of evidence from cognate languages that these are originally
> distinct homonyms. (I have not read the article, so I don't know what
> word is being referred to.) You seem happy to apply this principle to
> English, based on your knowledge of Norwegian which most others on this
> list do not share. Why do you object when other people apply the same
> principle to Hebrew, based on their knowledge of other Semitic languages
> which you do not know?
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
> Blog:    http://www.qaya.org/blog/
> Website: http://www.qaya.org/