Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Sasson Margaliot <sasson AT live.com>]

"Triliteral roots" (triplets of radical letters) are simply a mnemonic device invented to help out non-linguists attempting to study Hebrew Bible.

In terms of the *current* syntactic and morphological analysis, the question actually is: what is the root? 

Because the root is first merged with at least one derivational morpheme (needed to determine syntactic category of the word), and then merged with inflectional morphology.

In the case of Hebrew verb, the verb-building story starts with a biconsonantal (actually, monosyllabic) root. It does not yet belong to any syntactic category. Then adding a third consonant result in a verbal (or nominal, or adjectival) stem. 

Example:  TuB is the root,   K + TuB is the verbal stem. Mnemonic triplet: (K,T,B) - produced by removing of vowels.

The question is, then, how do we know which of the three letters spells out the derivational affix: the first one or, maybe, the third? It's easy (even if controversial) for irregular verbs. 

As for the regular verbs, there is no systematic answer in published linguistic research. Still, the state-of-art morpho-syntactic platform known as "Distributed Morphology" 

( http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/courses/Oxford/Marantz2.pdf )

provides all the necessary tools in order to try and identify biconsonantal roots in Semitic.

Sasson Margaliot

> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 16:00:27 -0400
> From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>
 
> In other words, the question is not what is the root, but rather what
> are the radical letters.
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University
>

> On Jun 23, 2013, at 3:30 PM, Sasson Margaliot wrote:
> > John Leake wrote:
> > "I agree that they are possible, and indeed the biliteral root is
> > supposed to be the origin of the triliteral root, but that's in the
> > deeply obscure pre-history of the Semitic languages."
> >
> > I do not agree with this statement. There seems to be a systematic
> > way to identify the "biliteral" Root in many traditional 3-Roots,
> > while working with Biblical Hebrew alone.
> > For example, for all "irregular" verbs, the Root is known. In the
> > case of Lamed"Hey, the third consonant is not part of Root - it is
> > a derivational suffix.
> > Similarly, there are many nouns that only have two root consonants.
> >
> > Sasson Margaliot