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  • From: berlant AT advanced-studies.org
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] PTR
  • Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:49:05 -0400

On Tue Mar 16 06:24:10 EDT 2010. Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

>Hello Steve,

Hello Yitzahk,

>In my opinion, your etymology is no less idiosyncratic than Isaac's.

Although I respect your opinion, I believe that you correctly qualified it as an "opinion." OTOH, you then go on to express what I think is a misplaced sense of certainty about it's validity.

>Tet is not "probably" a reflex of Taw. Tet is no doubt NOT a reflex of Taw.

In retrospect, perhaps "reflex" wasn't the best word. However, in antiquity Tet and Taw seem to have been as frequently confused within and between languages as they are today, and I've just given you what I think are valid reasons for believing that Pe-Tet and Pe-Tav were variants that resulted from this confusion.

One can, if he wishes, consider the Identity Pe-Tav/ open = Pe-Tet/open a coincidence. However, in the empirical and legal sciences, the difference between relevant evidence and coincidence is that the former can be logically, instructively and predictively united, whereas the latter cannot; and I think I just united Pe_Tav Pe-Tet in a logical, instructive and predictive way.

> The root PTR "to interpret" in Modern Hebrew is from Aramaic. The equivalent Hebrew root is P$R, indicating the original NWS root is p-th-r. /th/ (as in English "thin") developed into Shin in Hebrew and Taw in Aramaic.

I think that the issue is far more complex than you make it out to be, and that the confidence you express here is therefore a little misplaced, for reasons I recently pointed out in the following passage of an article titled "The Mysterious Ekron Goddess Revisited (JANES 31:15­21, 2009)

"It should also be noted that ptr has a number of obvious relatives in Hebrew and a host of other Semitic languages. For example, its sibilated form pšr refers to, among other things, releasing people from curses, exorcisms, and sins in, for example, Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian, though Sperling chose to believe that Hebrew ptr is not related to Aramaic or Akkadian pšr. (S.D. Sperling, "Studies in late Hebrew lexicography in light of the Akkadian." Dissertation. Columbia Univ. New York, 1973).

In any case, clearly related to ptr is also pthr, most notably in Pethor the birthplace of Balaam, the seer that Numbers 22-24 and Deuteronomy 23:4 curses for leading Hebrews astray. Although scholars have often identified Pethor as Pitru (W.F.. Albright, "Some important recent discoveries: alphabetic origins and the Idrimi statue." BASOR 118: 11-29, p. 15, N. 13.) Yaure argued convincingly that this relationship is far more complex, because Pethor was originally:
‘ . . . pathorah, a regular nomen agentis form of the verbal root ptr (‘to interpret'). This Aramaic title, pathorah = ‘The Interpreter', ( sc. of dreams and oracles), distiguished Balaam as a professional and reputed diviner, and had been taken over unaltered into the Hebrew narrative, and then was by later transcribers easily mistaken for a Hebrew locative, since both were written with identical letters. Accordingly, the original text of Num 22:5 must have been some plain statement such as: ‘ He sent messengers to Balaam ben Beor the pathorah to call him . . . (L. Yaure, "Elymas-Nehalamite-Pethor," JBL (1960) 79: 297-314, particularly 310-314.)"

Yaure went on to argue that Jerome must have recognized that pathorah was Balaam's epithet, for the Vulgate translates pathorah as hariolus, just as the Jerusalem Targum states: ‘He sent messengers to Laban the Aramean who is Balaam; . . . his place of residence is Padan, which is Pethor, so-called after his name pathor helmaiia." By the same token, the Peshitta translates pathora as pašora ‘Interpreter', because, as Yaure put it, "the Syriac translator of Numbers easily saw in the term in question a well known Aramaic expression and accordingly rendered it in his own cognate language with the related and idiomatic pašora (‘interpreter'). .

>3) The root R)Y is a triconsonantal root.

I apologize, but my Email program (Eudora) does not allow me to read or write in Hebrew, and I'm not familiar enough with the symbols people are using here to know which root (R)Y) you're referring to?

\>The use in your theory of the term "Afro-asiatic" is inappropriate as you only take into consideration Modern Hebrew.
Indeed, the moment one includes Aramaic and Arabic (both in Central Semitic) one sees that there is no "widespread Afro-asiatic root PTR"

You're right. The root was deducibly originally PT, not PTR, and I could go on to argue — convincingly I believe — that the same root is ancestral to scores of Indo-European words that I recently discussed in an article "Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the foot and leg symbolism hidden in Indo_European languages. (Semiotica. 171:265­290, 2008).

However, doing so would here take us well beyond the present issue and this list's scope.

> or "widespread Afro-asiatic root R"

On the contrary, if you look, for example, at Gabor Takacs' ‘Egyptian Etymological Dictionary', you'll see on page 136 a section "Egyptian *R = Semitic *R = Afro-Asiatic *R, and scores of words that were inferribly derived from that root. If you then compare, say, Heb "horah" for a circular dance to the AA words Takacs gives for dancing, you'll see that they are all logically cognate.

Regards,

Steve Berlant






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