Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 6:45 PM, James Read wrote:
> Thanks for trying but this is not what I class as evidence. My basic
> opinion is that if you wish to be taken seriously in a discussion then
> you need to provide primary data which back up your assertions. Citing
> secondary sources as an authority just doesn't cut any ice around here.

Hi James,

Citing sources does cut the ice around here.  You really can't expect
people to start and reinvent the wheel each time.  A good source can
give you a good background of what the various views of a particular
text where over time, and what various objections have been raised.
Really, these texts have been studied for thousands of years.  Don't
you think it is wise to at least read up on the various ways the
languages and texts have been viewed over time, rather than try to
work it all on your own from scratch?

In ancient times, languages were classified together based on
historical relationships, and vice versa.  You can see this in the
Table of Nations, where the two are essentially implied together.

But modern linguistics classifies languages based on linguistic
criteria alone.  In Indo-European linguistics, sound changes have
proven very useful for this.  However, in Afroasiatic linguistics,
where the languages were spoken in much nearer proximity to
each other for long periods of time (unlike Indo-European
languages that were spread out), this is not as useful.

You can read here (Alice Faber's article in Hetzron's The
Semitic languages) on the classification of Akkadian as
separate from West Semitic:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RWhvl4hD7S4C&pg=PA7

Because West Semitic languages contain innovations not
found in East Semitic, and East Semitic has innovations not
in West Semitic, we theorize that each developed on a
separate path rather than from the other language.  The
main question is what to decide as an innovation. Hetzron
suggested two principles:
a) archaic heterogeneity.  Basically, the more heterogeneous
a language appears to be, the more archaic it is presumed to
be.
b) shared morpholexical innovations.  The morpholexicon is
the "lexicon" of the morphemes of a language.  So in English
verbs, you have "ask", "asked", "asks", giving you -0, -ed,
and -s as the morpholexicon of the verb.  If two languages
show the same innovations in the morpholexicon as
compared with another, they are presumed to be related in
a genetic subgrouping to which the other language is not.
They are useful because they are least susceptible to
borrowing and relate to the structure of the language itself.
In other words, the main principle driving the innovations
in the morpholexicon is analogies among forms in the
language.  Another unrelated language will have different
forms and therefore will not generate the same analogies
and innovations.

Yitzhak Sapir