Biblical Hebrew Forum

[berlant AT advanced-studies.org]

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