Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] verb forms - Isaiah 56:6-7 was dying you shall die

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yonah Mishael <yonahmishael AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] verb forms - Isaiah 56:6-7 was dying you shall die
  • Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:39:18 +0100

On 19/04/2007 04:11, Yonah Mishael wrote:
Peter,

I fail to see how the terminations -/é/ or -/í/ of the preterite and
-/o/ of the present tense in Spanish can both refer to the same
first-person /yo/. I don't see how the -/aste/ or -/iste/ termination
of the second-person preteriste can be traced to the pronounce -/tú/.
Does one have to go into the proto-languages to view this stage in
development? ...

Yes, Yonah, you do. This process of attachment of personal pronouns to verbs to form verb conjugations happened, according to linguistic reconstructions, many thousands of years ago. Since then the process has been obscured by all kinds of phonetic changes in various languages. But the sheer variety of these phonetic changes implies that it is possible to reconstruct, rather speculatively, what changes did happen and when.

... If so, then it is still mostly conjectural, since there
is no example of any Proto-Indo-European language at play anywhere in
real world. It is a reconstruction (as even you state) rather than a
practical demonstration.

You are welcome to hold the epistemological and methodological position that it is impossible to make any kind of reconstruction of languages which have not survived in writing. But in that case you cannot make claims like "it just doesn't seem to be how language works", only ones like "we have no idea how language works and no way of finding out".

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





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page