Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

I like the nice mathematical beauty of the triliteral root theory, however,
when doing a survey of all roots while compiling my dictionary, I noticed
that several of the triliteral roots were in practice biliteral (two
letters) which were made into triliteral roots by the addition of a medial
waw or a doubling of the second letter. There are also a few quadraliteral
roots.
Within my dictionary, I have them listed according to triliteral roots
because of tradition.

As for the mix up of languages at the Tower of Babel, the story claims that
the people were mutually unable to understand each other’s languages from
the get go, not something that developed over time. Hence there is not the
expectation that we can find an etymological tree that can be traced back to
one language.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:02 AM, <belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr> wrote:

> Not so fast, please.
>
> I do not want to take sides in this dispute.: the problem of the
> emergence of natural languages has been rightly called recently "the
> most difficult scientific problem".
>
> However, Biblical Hebrew (the main topic of this forum), and some
> Semitic languages with it, do possess some unique, fundamental, and
> "primeval" feature not shared by other languages: the three consonant
> sturcture of verbs which, from the mathematical point of view, is at
> least as optimal as the command structure of any artificially designed
> Assembler language:
>
>
> http://padis2.uniroma1.it:81/ojs/index.php/cogphil/search/authors/view?firstName=Edward&middleName=G.&lastName=Belaga&affiliation=Universit%C3%A9%20dfe%20Strasbourg
>
> Dr. Edward G. Belaga
> ******************************************************
> Institut de Recherche en Mathématique Avancée
> Universite Louis Pasteur
> 7, rue René Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE
> tel.: 333 90 24 02 35, FAX: 333 90 24 03 28 , cellular: 336 76 29 63 04
> e-mail : edward.belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr
> ******************************************************