Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill <wrschmidt2 AT comcast.net>]

10:21 PM 4/22/2012, Karl Randolph wrote:

>>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.

I wish you would have told me that before I took 
the time to examine the evidence that caused me 
to conclude the opposite, as I never would have wasted my time.

>> 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?

As Carl Buck repeatedly showed in his "Dict. of 
Selected Synonyms in The Principle Indo-European 
Languages,' and a multitude of others linguists 
showed elsewhere, a wealth of evidence reveals 
that ancient wordsmiths often used the same 
associations to derive one word from another or 
the same word root. Hence any logician would 
recognize that etymologies showing how words for 
gullibility and opening evolved from words for 
the mouth in other languages can be logically 
invoked to support the assertion that Hebrew PTH 
‘gullible, open' was derived from Pe ‘mouth'.

.> 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.

Will Parsons wrote:

>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
>PTCH/PTH, PTY—, and PQCH— without justifying the phonological transformations
>that would be necessary to derive one from another.

The phonological transformations are transparent 
— at least to me. The original root "Pe" ‘mouth, 
opening' had at least two extended forms PQ and 
PT, The latter had 1) a terminally velarized, 
variant PTCH that referred to openings in the 
physical sense, and 2) a terminally aspirated 
variant PTH that referred to the corresponding 
psychological and spiritual condition.

Whereas I now realize that Gesenius was evidently 
implying as much when he simply said that the 
roots were ‘akin', I would now go beyond Gesenius 
by further associating PTCH and PTH with 1) PTR 
‘to set free, open' and 2) PD ‘to ransom, 
deliver, redeem', considering the following axioms, facts and deductions:

1) Implicit in the concepts of ransoming, 
delivering, and redeeming a person is the concept 
of opening that which holds the person captive;

2) The voiced and unvoiced dental stops (D & T, 
respectively) were inferribly as related to each 
other and to the inter-dental affricate (Th) in 
Biblical Hebrew as they were in Indo-European 
languages wherein, for instance,  Latin "pater, 
German faeder, and, Eng father were all derived from the same root.

3) Occham's Razor, which in this case holds that 
it is more hypothetically economical to accept 
the theory that the foregoing, radically 
identical words are also semantically identical 
or readily associable because they were derived 
from a single root that began with Pe and ended 
with a dental stop  than to accept the theory 
that the words were derived from different roots 
that coincidentally begin with Pe and ended with dental stops.

The only question in my mind is when and how 
did  changing the way the abovementioned dentals 
were voiced and terminally aspirated or velarized 
transform opening in the physical sense to 
opening in the psychological sense and/or setting 
free or ransoming in the minds of the people who heard the words.

>> 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'.

Will Parson continued to write:

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

The phonetic similarities aren't vague at all. 1) 
S and $ are generally recognized as palatalized 
reflexes of T in many of the world's languages, 
including the Semitic, and 2)  G, X, and Q are 
velar stops that frequently interchanged in the 
same and other languages; cf "index", "indicate," 
and "digit,' all of which were derived from the same root.

One can, of course, simply deny any and all 
evidence that these relationships existed in 
Biblical Hebrew, too. But I can't understand why 
a reasonable person would want do that if 
accepting the relationships can 1) reveal why the 
words are semantically identical or readily 
associable, and 2) show that ancient Hebrew 
wordsmiths intuitively used the same associations 
that ancient Greek and Germanic wordsmiths used 
to derive words for opening and gullibility from words for the mouth.

Isaac Fried then wrote:

> In Gen. 3:7 PAQAX is used to the parting of 
the eyelids to expose the  pupil (indeed, in the 
extended sense of understanding what one 
sees),  while in 1Ki 8:29 the verb PATAX is used 
for it. In Dt. 15:8 PATAX is  used for the parting of the fingers of the hand.

In addition, I can't understand why anyone would 
choose to interpret PAQAX in Genesis 3:7 
circuitously as "parting of the eyelids to expose 
the pupil" when the verb can be and, thus, has 
been ubiquitously interpreted as an obvious 
reference to opening the eyes. The former 
interpretation thus obfuscates the fact that 
parting and separating are nothing but forms of 
opening, Hence the phrase "spreading the legs" is 
tantamount to the phrase "opening the legs up".

Will Parsons wrote:

>A lot of phonetic similarities can be 
attributed to simple coincidence, especially when
>what are being compared are sequences of three consonants only.

In trial law the difference between evidence and 
coincidences is that the former can be logically 
linked in a way that reveals intent, whereas the 
latter can't be, and in this case, the verbs in 
question can indeed be logically linked in a way that reveals intent.

Finally, let me say that there is no need to show 
that TAW invariably corresponds to Qoph to prove 
that PQ is cognate with PT if PQ and PT are the 
extended forms of Pe they evidently are --  any 
more than it was necessary to show that *n 
inviolably corresponds to *t when Latin mensis 
‘month' and Latin metiri ‘measure' were 
attributed to the same Proto-Indo-European root 
root *me-. In both cases, the original roots were 
deducibly, originally monoconsonantal.

Of course, Descartes's evil genie could have led 
me to believe that everything I've deduced here 
is false. But in the absence of compelling 
evidence and arguments to that effect, I have no 
reason to doubt the validity of my conclusions.


Regards

William Schmidt