Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jonathan:

Just because a word has a similar form to another word sound does not indicate that it has a similar meaning.

For example, spelled phonetically, the following sentence “Ðer ar þrē ‘tū’z in Iņgliş” is actually not accurate, as one of the words pronounced ‘tū’ (to) is two different words that have converged in pronunciation and spelling.

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Jonathan Mohler <jonathan.mohler AT gmail.com> wrote:

I don't see the mystery here.  מעונן M-ONEN has to do with seeing in the future.  It has an ayin and a nun. So it must be related to עין (ayin, eye.  How hard is that? (ayin words are common in other language groups.  Swahili, for example, has ona, see.

Jonathan E. Mohler

Baptist Bible Graduate School

Springfield, MO

Likewise just because עין and ענן are similar in form (original pronunciation may have diverged more than modern) does not mean that they come from similar meaning. Further, the word עין is itself used as a verb, as a synonym for ראה.

Looking at the uses of the verb ענן where is all but one use the contexts indicates that it refers to a type of fortunetelling (the one exception may be from a different root), and its written form is the same as “cloud” makes us guess that this is a type of fortunetelling related to looking at cloud shapes.

There’s no mystery here.

Karl W. Randolph.