Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>]

Hello Isaac:

Sorry about the mischaracterization of your granddaugther.

If I understand you correctly, zee-vah זיוה the popular name; and zeev-ah
זיבה the illness, have a common etymology. And that commonality includes the
identity of letters "vav" ו and "bet" ב ; and the single root meaning: "to
come."

The verb עבה "a-va" as thick, and as expressed in noun form 1 kings 7:26, I
suppose I can see as emanating from the root letter "bet," ב "to come."

Your comment in your paragraph 2 is most interesting. I thought that a
person raised and trained in the hebrew language spoken in israel today,
cannot, absent special additional training, understand a reading of the
torah? Am I incorrect in this conclusion?

In other words, the average college educated person in america, who never
read the english language bible, can nonetheless understand the
english language of the bible being read to him the first time at say age
21.

Is that true for the average college educated person in israel who has never
read the torah? Can she understand the torah being read to her for the first
time at say age 21? ... Or does such a person exist?

Thanks for your comments.

regards,

fred burlingame

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:

> 0. She is not my "relative", she is my granddaughter, and she is not "very
> young", she is 5 years old.
> 1. Yes. ABAH and AWAH mean that something came, BA, materialized עבה (or
> עוה), and settled in our consciousness, driving us to yield to it's, often
> vehement, insistence. So, BA LI is a clear and succinct ANI MIT-ABAH
> (namely, מתאוה or מתעבה) LE-.
> 2. there is no such thing as "modern" Hebrew.
> 3. I return to my previous example. You may call (by voice) your daughter
> ZIYBAH, but you must write it ZIYVAH (the registrar may refuse to register
> ZIYBAH in order to protect the dignity and reputation of the child). We are
> calling her ZIYBAH (which is the same as ZIYVAH), but we know that it is
> written with a vav. Seeing the word and hearing the word are
> interconnected.
> 4. All you have to do to study Hebrew etymology is to put your mind to it.
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
>  (Isaac Fried, Boston University
>
>
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