I assume there are many around here who believe that Hebrew (or its earlier
form, say, Ugaritic or even Accadian) is a naturally derived language.
Anyone, please explain me this puzzle about the roots.
...
Perhaps the roots were originally of varying length, and adjusted to three
letters only late? No evidence for this. Besides, this would also have been
an arbitrary decision.
Forming stems with prefixes seems a centralized decision. I can imagine how a
cavemen one morning decided to add hey to produce casuative, perhaps by
analogy with directional suffix hey. But how did he convince others to follow
the suit? One could invent a word, and it slowly drifts down, becoming
popular, right. But this development seems less plausible with stems.
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