Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

    Perhaps  you mixed me up with someone else.
 I am a bit more optimistic about the relation of
 modern Hebrew to Biblical Hebrew - it is much
 stronger than some assume. Of course, a speaker of
 the biblical language won't understand the modern,
 but he would understand current words like Bayit
 or Hayom, even though pronounced a bit differently.

      Incidentally, the late Max Ellenbogen once pointed
 out to me: there is no doubt that a word like Kalbi
 (my dog) had the same meaning and  was
 pronounced the same way for thousands of years.

     Without some knowledge of cognate
 languages it is hard to understand why masculine
 sounding biblical words like Esh (fire), or
 EZ (goat) are femninine; nor why there is a Nun
 in the plural of Bat (daughter)  etc.


    Uri Hurwitz