Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Isaac,

Who said anything about "mechanical translation"? I thought we were 
attempting a semantic analysis here with this discussion? If so, BH 
melek and malkut equate semantically, or overlap semantically, with 
English "king" and "kingdom" respectively. The -ut suffix is joined to 
malk-, but crucially not to address the addressee and simultaneously 
point out some third-person referent. If anything, I would say that your 
own approach is far too "mechanical" in finding personal pronouns in 
every nook and cranny. Just because there is a 'u' and a 't' does not 
mean that we have to see a morphological makeup of one or two personal 
pronouns, only that we have here two phonemes, /t/ and /u/, which, 
unsurprisingly due to their phonemic status, are found in some personal 
pronouns also many, many other words and morphemes in BH.

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> Pere,
>
> The flow chart should go, methinks, this way
>
>                   ----------> MELEK, king
>
> MLK, root
>                   ----------> MALKUT, kingdom, kingship
>
> Now, matters become befogged because we jump from one language to  
> another and think that by mechanical translation we achieve  
> understanding. To understand the Hebrew you need to explain to  yourself 
> what MELEK and MALKUT mean without using the English  equivalents, only 
> the root MLK.
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University