Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <nir AT ccet.ufrn.br>]

paul, pere,

actually all european languaages have various mechanisms to distinguish slight
shades of meaning, by adding prefixes and suffixes, just as 
or-orah is obtained by a suffix. just for illustration:

or/orah: 
lux/lumen/illuminatio
light/lightning/lighting/illumination
luz/iluminación/lustre/lumbrera/luminosidad
lumiere/allumage/allumette/allumeuse/illumination

geva/giv'ah:
mound/mount/mountain
monte/montaña/montón/montura/montículo

etc etc. just like in hebrew, rarely can we claim any such pair 
to be identical, or even know exactly what each single word 
meant EXACTLY when it was used. wittgenstein wrote a whole book 
("on certainty") dedicated to the meaning of the word "chair".

speaking about chairs, consider the triple KES-KISE-KSUT. what do we 
know about the origin and meaning of these wrds, originally? how did the ALEPH
come to be added, or subtracted, from the word? was a chait/throne originally
a kind of mantle?

regards
nir cohen

ps maybe "orah" can be explained out as an aramaism, much later to "or".

On Sat, 8 Jan 2011 07:26:36 -0500, Paul Zellmer wrote
> Pere, perhaps that is what you meant to find, but your question was 
> whether the addition of the He had a significance.  Now what you are 
> changing the question to is: are there other word pairs where the 
> Western languages do not separate out the semantic domains?
> 
> My impression (although the sample size of three instances for )WRFH 
> is extremely small) is that the He is probably generalizing the 
> concept of )WR, but our Western languages do not have a way to do 
> that with the concept "light".  Instances where one language 
> distinguishes between aspects of semantic domains and another does 
> not differentiate is very common.  If there are other cases where 
> the Western languages are also deficient in a distinction made by 
> the Hebrew, they would be purely accidental.  The situation(s) do 
> not say anything about the Hebrew form or concepts.
> 
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Paul Zellmer
> 
> -----Or