Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:42:33 -0400, Bill <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net> wrote:
> At 01:13 AM 4/17/2012, K Randolph wrote :
> 
>> PTH to allure, entice, PTY gullible, gullibility. In other words,
>> the verb refers to taking advantage of others gullibility. It has
>> nothing to do with opening. . . . .  . But in these cases, the
>> meanings are so different that no etymological connection can be
>> made.
> 
> I don't want to come off as being an argumentative know-it-all, 
> especially because Biblical Hebrew is not my forte. However, the 
> Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT) has in its entry for 
> PTH and PTY: "The basic verb idea is 'be open, wide, spacious."
> 
> Moreover, I think we can deduce that the concept of gullibility --as 
> well as the concepts of enticing, deceiving, and persuading -- that 
> existed in PTH was indeed a melioration of the concept of openness 
> that had theretofore lied inchoate a) in the mouth, b) the logogram 
> that Hebrew scribes used to represent the mouth, c) the root peh that 
> referred to the mouth, and d) many of peh's derivatives, if we 
> recognize the following facts and forced deductions.
> 
> First, Roget's Thesaurus lists 1) "susceptible" as a synonym for 
> "gullible," and 2) "open" as a synonym for  "susceptible." Hence 
> "open" and "gullible" must also be considered synonyms.

So you have by logical deduction based on Roget's Thesaurus come to a
conclusion that "open" and "gullible" are synonyms in English, which
in fact is not the case.

> Second, Greek "anastomow" 'to open up' was derived from Gk "stoma" 
> 'mouth' evidently to identify the relatively abstract notion of 
> opening with the physical act of opening the mouth

And how is this relevant to Biblical Hebrew?

> [other highly speculative ideas on development snipped]

> This analysis therefore strongly suggests, if not clearly reveals, 
> that PTCH and PTH are as cognate as they clearly reveal because PTCH 
> was coined to associate creating a vacuous, open or empty condition 
> with opening the mouth, and 2) PTH  to refer to the corresponding 
> psychological condition.

Again, highly speculative.  Apart from the semantic difficulties that
Karl has brought out (and with which I agree) there are phonological
problems that cannot be simply glossed over.  One cannot simply equate
פתה/פתי, פתח, and פקח without justifying the phonological transformations
that would be necessary to derive one from another.

> I think we can then go even deeper into this linguistic gestalt by 
> recognizing, as Isaac Fried did,  that "The root PTX is apparently a 
> variant of . . . PSG, PSX, PCX, P$X, P$Q, (PSQ), PTX with acts 
> connoting 'spread'.

I'd like to have more real evidence that these are related than a vague
phonetic similarity.

[more stuff snipped]

-- 
William Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.