Frankly, Karl, I didn't think I had to learn Ugaritic until I wanted
to convince my professor Gzella here in Leiden, of the gemination
theory for the definite article in Arabic and Hebrew. I can imagine
this won't interest everyone, b.t.w. However, this theory belongs to
Galia Hatav's, and my, theory on the "wayyiqtol" form and the article.
All I have to do now, in fact, is to show Gzella that his reference to
the Ugaritic word /hn/ (which I think is in this case not relevant to
BHebrew) doesn't make sense. For example, the article always preceeds
the noun, and I want to take a look at this /hn/, suspecting it
follows nouns, and not preceeds them.
So I don't think I need Ugaritic to understand Hebrew better, I think
we need Hebrew to understand Ugaritic better! The reason being that we
simply know a lot more of Hebrew: we have a lot of vowels etc. of it,
not of Ugaritic.
שלום, Herman
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