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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: pporta AT oham.net, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Question
  • Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:20:24 +1100

Hi Pere,

The problem with the statement is that it assumes that the gender-marking of the adjective and noun is in fact person-marking (speech-participant marking), here third-person. That's why he says "-AH refers to the *feminine bearer* of the attribute" and "-AH refers to *the thing itself*."

Even more bizarre and illogical is his example of what has traditionally been seen to be gender-marking is in fact second-person marking:

"The counterpart to MAR, 'mister' is MAR-AT, where -AT is surely the personal pronoun AT, 'you'."

These assertions rest on no linguistic foundation whatsoever and are able to be uttered only because of naiveness in relation to the fundamentals and basics of general linguistics. No linguist would give assent to them.

Rather, gender-marking on nouns and adjectives is an indexical or agreement coding strategy which indexes a semantic dependency of that indicated by the morpheme in question. In this sense, then, I take it that gender-marking "refers", but this issue is actually theoretically divisive, so not everyone will agree with this statement. But gender-marking on nouns and adjectives is not to be equated and collapsed with person-marking!

Regards,
David Kummerow.


David,

I'm not Isaac's advocate, but I ask you: what do you find to be wrong or mistaken in this statement of his?:

"4. In the adjective TOBAH, 'good', -AH refers to the feminine bearer of
the attribute, but in the noun TOBAH, 'favor, goodness', -AH refers to
the thing itself."

Best regards from

Pere Porta
Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain)






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