Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>]

1. It is not clear to me what you mean by "having to deal with". 

2. I am sorry that what I say makes you "sick and tired". We need to be patient, tolerating and persevering in bearing and correcting the errants. 

3. Hebrew has a perfectly preserved root system, whereas the Indo-European languages have long ago lost it, and with the loss of the root they have also lost the memory of the original grammar of their language. They, indeed, add to their words fore and aft, but they don't know anymore what they are adding.

3. The Hebrew grammar is crystal clear and is expressed in one sentence:

             A Hebrew word is a root plus personal pronouns.

Reference to an actor makes a verb, while reference to a thing makes a noun.

4. Hebrew has not only aft-and-fore addenda, but also inclusions. We have in Hebrew not only banana I-eat, 'I will eat a banana', banana eat-I, 'I ate a banana', but also banana ea-I-t, 'I am eating a banana'. 

4. Reference here to "most semitic languages, old and new", such as the alleged "Akkadian", "Ugaritic", and "Hurrian", of which we (OK, I) know nothing, and for which we have not the slightest means of verifying the allegations, is meaningless. 

5. Linguistics is a kindergarten science dressed in home-cooked highfalutin terminology. There is nothing to study there.  

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Dec 7, 2012, at 11:52 PM, Nir cohen - Prof. Mat. wrote:

isaac, 

frankly, i am sick and tired of having to deal with your old routine 

each and every time the four-letter word is mentioned on b-hebrew 

(the word "verb").

the truth which you ignore is that MANY languages, besides hebrew, denote 

the future by a fore-unit, the past by an aft-unit, and the present 

by the absence of both. just WHAT unit they choose as fore and aft, 

varies according to the language. this may (or may not) depict a 

"primitive sense of direction" in language, or a "primordial" form 

of tense. namely, your back and forth arrows.

these include, needless to say, most semitic languages, old and new, 

but also most older (and many modern) indo-european languages and

probably additional language families. even in MODERN english, the 

main simple tenses (used in the germanic languages before they were modified 

by a vulgar latin modal component) are of this type:

i SHALL-study (fore unit), i studi-ED (aft unit), i study (no-unit).

(you should study linguistics.)

so, hebrew has verbs after all - what a relief. can we PLEASE stop 

eating bananas now and go back to more mundane b-hebrew topics?