Biblical Hebrew Forum

["J. Leake" <john.leake AT yahoo.co.uk>]

Hebrew, Aramaic and Phoenician all have לחם as 'bread'. You have to be careful - the 'root' is only a way of new word formation. If two words exist in Hebrew with long histories - say leHem 'bread' and milHama 'war', both of which exist in the sister languages of North West Semitic - the root system will allow new words to be formed from them or from the associated verbs. But you can't really look at lHm and talk about its meaning. It doesn't have a meaning. Only the words do. It's easy to get carried away trying to extract abstract meanings from roots. It's a mistake most beginners and many more advanced users of Semitic languages make. It's better to think of each 'root meaning' as being a nexis of etymologically related words, and you can have several of these nexes for each root.

On patterns, Arabic laHm means 'meat', an alternative development from the original idea of 'food'. We can see something similar in English. The Old English word mete means 'food'. Even in Eighteenth Century Scots it retains that meaning: "Some have meat and cannot eat", says Burns, meaning "Some have food". Now meat has supplanted flesh as the word for meat. Arabic also has an equivalent of /milHama/, malHama, which means 'butcher's shop' but also 'bloody fight'. It's also the name of a genre of heroic poetry - the battle. What's happened? maf'al is a form for a place, so a 'place of meat' has been formed from /laHm/ that happily coincides with the older word for battle. Or that's my analysis.

John

 

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'inna SâHiba Hayâtin hanî'atin lâ yudawwinuhâ: 'innamâ, yaHyâhâ.
(He who lives a comfortable life doesn't write about it - he lives it.)
Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yawmiyyât Nâ'ib fil-'Aryâf.

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