Thank you for your reply. But in fact there is good reason to assume
that these two words are common at least to NW Semitic - because they
are letter names! The use of a the letter vav looking like a hook and
the letter tav looking like a mark or cross goes back to the
proto-Canaanite script (indeed the latter is found as early as Wadi
el-Hol, around 1800 BCE), and was also borrowed into Greek - along with
the letter name tau, also originally wau which became known later as
digamma. This implies that these two words were used by Semites rather
early, probably around 2000 BCE when the alphabet was invented on the
acrophonic principle.
> I am looking for examples of other nouns of the same form as cav derived
> from verbal roots as Karl suggests is the case with cav. ...
I don't think you will find any others, at least in biblical Hebrew. I
looked at all 22 possible two consonant words ending in consonantal vav,
and listed them almost all.
> 2) There should be some clear example of the verb used in conjunction with
> the noun, like we have in taw. This does not have to involve nouns ending
> with waw, but rather show a pattern where, for example, verbs with medial
> W have a two letter derived nouns from the first and last letters of the
verbal
> root. ...
But this is not the hypothesis! The hypothesis a noun of the form XY (X
and Y here being unknowns) derived from a "lamed-he" type verb XYH. And
we have an example simply by reading XY and XYH as transliterations, and
by understanding the Hebrew verb for "live" to be the attested form XYH
rather than the conjectural XWH. That is certainly a well attested
pairing with a clear semantic link.
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