Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>]

David,

You have it all wrong. The "gender-marking" is a figment of your (or  
your mentors') imagination. You can safely shed it from your vocabulary.
It is crystal clear to me now that not only did you not put so much  
as a dent in "my theories", but that you have shown yourself also  
still quite confused as to what the Hebrew language is all about.
I suggest that you read my book and pay close attention to my  
postings on this list.
I am sorry that my responses to you are often curt, but I sometimes  
find the improvised logic of you postings so frustrating as to render  
them unanswerable.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Dec 11, 2007, at 6:20 PM, David Kummerow wrote:

> 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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