Biblical Hebrew Forum

[john.leake AT yahoo.co.uk]

Thank you - nexus -ūs. 

The words within what I'm calling a semantic nexus are related in as much as a speaker can relate one to another as dependent on one another or can relate them by semantic similarity. So a noun in the form of the active participle is related to the qal form, but may have other secondary meanings that won't magically feed back to the verb. And the speaker can use the resources of the language to create new words, so the unattested hiphîl of lāHam could be used by a speaker as a one-use word (assuming it wasn't in use anyway), just as we might form a verb from a noun, 'to Blair something up', to make political capital out of something, say.

The semantic nexus round leHem comprises the noun 'bread, food' and the qal in the sense 'to eat' found for example in Proverbs 4:17 (כי לחמו לחם רשע    ויין חמסים ישתו). Round מלחמה is that noun 'battle' and the niph'al 'to fight' (and the qal in the two times it is used in the sense 'to fight', both times poetically in Psalms). Neither nexus as we have them contains words that are dependent on one another, so they can be grouped only be sense.

As for connections between these two nexuses, might I suggest it's irrelevant for Hebrew? The distinction between לחם and מלחמה seems to go back to Proto-West-Semitic, and has no bearing on Hebrew (or Aramaic, I think). Arabic, as I showed, has interestingly (re)connected the two nexuses, easier when لحم means 'meat'.

John

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From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>;
To: J. Leake <john.leake AT yahoo.co.uk>;
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>;
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] ובלחם
Sent: Thu, Apr 11, 2013 10:30:10 PM

It is not clear to me what this "nexis" (or nexus) is. Also, how are "etymologically related words" related by a meaningless root. Are לחם LEXEM, 'bread, solid food', and מלחמה MI-LXAM-AH, 'combat', related?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Apr 11, 2013, at 4:16 PM, J. Leake wrote:

 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.