Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net>]

Karl and Pere,

Thanks very much for your responses, and for 
excusing my failure to use Hebrew fonts and 
unconventional transliterations sometimes.

I agree that the verbs in question probably 
aren't cognate - i.e., unless we attribute them 
to a primitive, monoconsonantal root consisting of peh alone

OTOH, as Harris, Archer, and Waltke point out in 
The Theological Workbook to the OT, petah appears 
with peh 'mouth' in Mic7:5, and petah is a form 
of patah 'to open' which appears twenty-three 
times with peh 'mouth' , six times with the 
saphah 'lips in the semantically equivalent 
phrase, and seven times with ayin 'eyes.

So I think that petah is certainly semantically identical  to peqach.

Bill



At 05:09 PM 4/13/2012 K Randolph,  wrote:


> While I list the two terms as synonyms in my 
> dictionary, they have distinctly different meanings as listed below.
>
> פקח to open in the sense of giving vision, hearing
>
> פתח to open, the basic sense is to open a 
> hole, opening, door ⇒ to dig or engrave a 
> hole, ditch, groove as in writing, furrow in 
> field, carving in relief on a wall or door

> As for Gesenius, he is wrong in so many places 
> that I no longer take anything he wrote at face 
> value. In fact, my dictionary started out as 
> corrections in the margins of his dictionary as 
> I read Tanakh through over and over again.
>
> As for etymology, without clear examples to 
> guide us, is mere speculation with a greater chance of being wrong than right.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 3:17 AM, Bill 
> <<mailto:wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net>wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net> wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> I was just wondering if anybody could tell me whether the Hebrew
> verbs peqach and petah 'to open' are today considered as cognate as
> Gesenius claimed they are in his lexicon, and if so, what the
> original root could have been.
>
> Thanks very much for any insight anyone can give me into the origin
> of these words and any possible relationship.
>
> Sincerely,
> Bill Schmidt