Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hi Isaac,

On Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:03:54 -0400, Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu> wrote:
> 1. It is not clear to me how to advance "real evidence" for something
> that is manifestly self evident.

What is self-evident to you is not so much to me.  A lot of phonetic
similarities can be attributed to simple coincidence, especially when
what are being compared are sequences of three consonants only.
Nevertheless, I'm not completely excluding the possibility of a
relationship, just that it needs to be based on more that individual
phonetic similarities.  What I would regard as "real evidence" is a
pattern of correspondences, whereby it could be demonstrated that taw
corresponds to qoph in a series of semantically-related roots (not
just פתח and פקח), and that heth corresponds to... (what? nothing? a
vowel?  a [j]?) in a series of roots besides פתה/פתי and פקח.  Perhaps
it is possible to demonstrate such correspondences on a systematic
level, but I at least haven't seen such claims.

-- 
Will Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.