Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>]

Yitzhak,

Thanks for the plug. For what it is worth, I personally disagree with  
Goetze and lean towards the view that the doubling indicates  
plurality as is common in Semitic (and non-Semitic) languages. This  
was argued well by Joseph Greenberg (though I haven't put up a  
summary of this paper yet):

Greenberg, Joseph H. “The Semitic ‘intensive’ as verbal plurality: a  
study of grammaticalization. Pages 577-587 in Semitic studies in  
honor of Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday.  
Edited by Alan S Kaye. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991.

I summarize Kouwenberg's study of the D-stem (piel) in Akkadian in  
which he reaches the same conclusions:

http://balshanut.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/kouwenberg-njc-gemination- 
in-the-akkadian-verb-studia-semitica-neerlandica-33-assen-van- 
gorcum-1997/

Peter Bekins

On Feb 9, 2009, at 12:52 AM, b-hebrew-request AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> Peter Bekins discusses one article on the Piel here:
> http://balshanut.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/goetze-albrecht-the-so- 
> called-intensive-of-the-semitic-languages-jaos-vol-62-no-1- 
> march-1942-1-8/
>
> Also relevant is his discussion here:
> http://balshanut.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/the-complicated- 
> morphology-of-the-semitic-binyanim/
>
> Yitzhak Sapir