Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 01/04/2007 04:45, Isaac Fried wrote:
> Peter,
>
> I wish you would explain to us (if explainable!) what this 
> "abstraction" is, and what this "limited extent"  is.
Roots are an abstraction because they do not appear in any actual text, 
they are constructs by scholars to explain the grammar of those texts. 
They are somewhat helpful in that they allow readers to recognise 
semantically related words as being derived from the same root. But this 
helpfulness has limitations in that words which are morphologically from 
the same root are quite often not related semantically, and because for 
some words such as biliteral nouns it is not at all clear that "root" is 
a meaningful concept.

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