Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Peter,

Regarding Arabic, Lumsden and Halefon (2003) provide single pronominal 
paradigm uniting independent personal pronouns, suffix verb inflections, 
prefix verb inflections, verbal pronominal suffixes, and nominal pronoun 
suffixes. Their work references similar analyses for Chaha and Amharic.

Regarding BH, Prince (1975) provides a paradigm uniting all of the above 
less the prefix verb. Malone (1993) argues the same, but I can't 
remember if he includes the prefix verb or not.

Lumsden, John S. and Girma Halefom. 2003. “Verb Conjugations and the 
Strong Pronoun Declension in Standard Arabic.” Pages 305-337 in Research 
in Afroasiatic Grammar II: Selected Papers from the Fifth Conference on 
Afroasiatic Languages, Paris, 2000. Edited by Jacqueline Lecarme. 
Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 241. 
Amsterdam/Philedelphia: John Benjamins.

Malone, Joseph L. 1993. Tiberian Hebrew Phonology. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

Prince, Alan S. 1975. “The Phonology and Morphology of Tiberian Hebrew.” 
PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Regards,
David Kummerow

> On 18/04/2007 04:13, Yonah Mishael wrote:
>  > ...
>  > To some extent I can see this in Latin in the present tense of the
>  > first person singular, but for the most part I don't think this is the
>  > case that the two line up so clearly:
>  >
>  > AMARE - to love (present tense)
>  > amo (ego)*
>  > amas (tu)
>  > amat (-)
>  > amamus (nos)
>  > amatis (vos)
>  > amant (-)
>  >
>  > They did not even have a static form of the third person pronoun until
>  > late in the development of the language. I don't think your theory can
>  > account, even in Latin, for the various formatives (for example, the
>  > -av- of the perfect tense) that create a verb form. Though it seems
>  > more plausible to Hebrew specifically, I cannot imagine that this one
>  > language developed any differently than the many others that were in
>  > use in ancient times or those of which we can observe the development
>  > through written history (such as English, German, and Spanish). Though
>  > it is an interesting theory, it just doesn't seem to be how language
>  > works.
>  >
>  >
> Yonah, you can't see this clearly in Latin because the fusion actually
> took place much earlier. If you look back at reconstructed
> Proto-Indo-European, see the examples I gave earlier, the
> correspondences are much more clear. Despite what Uri wrote, that "this
> is the realm of sheer speculation", this is in fact as clearly
> demonstrated as anything can be from the remote past. This is how
> language works, even if you have to look a bit beyond Latin 101 to see it.