Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Pere:

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com> wrote:

Dear b-hebrew listers,

 

In the Grammar section of our friend's Karl W. Randolph dictionary (the work he was so kind to let us know on this list), I read this concerning "Noun":

 

1. "Usuallly derived from a verb"

Is this true?  There are in Hebrew many nouns not derived from a verb. For instance, שמש, shemesh, sun; מלח, melax, salt; דור, dor, generation...

Fortunately, Karl himself writes also: "Not all nouns are derived from verbs"

This is already a departure from what I was taught in the one year class that I had. I was taught that all nouns were derived from verbs, even the dictionaries recommended in class backed up that idea by inventing verbal roots for nouns, roots that are not attested to in Tanakh. I no longer believe that for the reasons I mentioned in the grammar section. Even so, it appears that well over 50% of nouns can be traced back to verbal roots, hence the “usually”.

(Incidentally, דור, dor, generation has a verbal root, connected to the idea of the cycle of life from dust to dust. The root is “דור to make a circle (of wood) Ez 24:5 go about as in cycling around Ps 84:11 (10)”.)

 

2. Shegolate: wrong. It must be "segolate".

Thank you. It is for corrections like this, and hopefully corrections more substantial than this as well, that I put out my dictionary and connected grammar.

One correction: what I wrote about the optative mood is wrong, and will be deleted in my next update.

 

3. He writes that

-- Segolate are nouns that are spelled with the same consonants as a third person singular Qal Qatal verb

--but during the Masoretic times pronounced with two short "e" sounds following the first two consonants.

 

Can we accept this?

This is true, isn’t it? 

 

Noun ארח, orax, way (Gn 18:11) has two "e" sounds?

I was taking for granted that people know that not all nouns having the same consonantal spelling as third person singular Qal Qatal verbs are segolate nouns, only some of them are. Maybe I should add a clarifying note?

What I retained from class was that a segolate noun has two segols for its vowels, apparently that is wrong? Apparently yes.

Note: apparently the segolate form is late, possibly not earlier than Mishnaic or even Masoretic Hebrew. Even Waltke & O’Conner mention that the Amarna Letters, archaeologically dated to the Divided Kingdom era, give clues that the language then spoken was apparently a CVCVCV form with no consonantal clusters. I had earlier to my reading of Waltke & O’Conner come to the tentative conclusion derived from reading the unpointed text that such a form was possibly the case.

 

VERY IMPORTANT: My criticism is absolutely positive, looking only for the improvement...

Thank you. You have made a positive improvement. 

 

Greetings.

--
Pere Porta
(Barcelona, Catalonia, Northeastern Spain)

Karl W. Randolph.