Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

You're perhaps confusing פה with a heh and פתח with a heth. They are 
semantically different and unrelated. One may open (פתח) the mouth to speak, 
but open (פקח) the eyes or ears to let vision/sound in.


GEORGE ATHAS
Dean of Research,
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)


On 15/04/2012, at 1:51 AM, "Bill" <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net> wrote:

> 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.
>> 
>> פק×- to open in the sense of giving vision, hearing
>> 
>> פת×- to open, the basic sense is to open a 
>> hole, opening, door â?' 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
> 
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