Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Dear Isaac,

The value of following the methodology of phonemic analysis is that you
are conducting linguistic analysis using the building blocks of language
rather than some other unsubstantiated construct. I say unsubstantiated
because the introduction to your book provides no interaction or
critique of phonemics, and the subjective cause you follow is entirely
divergent to phonemics without really a hint that what you are proposing
cannot be formulated using standard scientific linguistic methodology.
We cannot discuss the sort of evidence such as (AQAD and )AGAD
productively if you do not comprehend the basics.

Now you did not actually say that Q=D or D=R explicitly, but "replacing"
them willy-nilly does not seem different to me. In your theoretical
construct, cannot qof be "replaced" by gimel, qaf, he, and het because
they all represent the same underlying phoneme with some very abstract
semantics of "hugeness" or something? It does not seem very remote at
all from what I said.

I am confused: you say now that "[w]hat I said is that if you replace D
by R you get the OPPOSITE root", yet you said previously that "we
replace the D by an R and have (AQAR, suggesting that all we can say
about what Abraham did is that he held is son still [literally "planted"
him] upon the altar above the firewood." There's nothing about opposites
here. It reads to me like your saying that if we replace D with R we get
(AQAR which literally means "planted".

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> David,
>
> I a sorry but I am not sure what the value of this "established
> scientific linguistic methodology of phonemics" is. It is also not
> clear to me at all why I cannot relate (AQAD to (AGAD. If you say
> that (AQAD is 'bind, tie together', than it is one and the same as )
> AGAD.
> I never said that Q=D nor that D=R. Never ever. I am afraid you are
> not paying good attention to what I am saying. What I said is that if
> you replace D by R you get the OPPOSITE root.
> It is true that the Arabic dictionaries list (QD as 'tied', and so do
> Hebrew dictionaries, the question is when did this meaning enter the
> language. Unless we know this we should not use it.
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University