Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] The Sade/Ayin-Quf literary device
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:45:25 +0000
On 05/01/2007 09:35, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
... Furthermore, all letters appear to be isolated
nouns that have no independent verbs of the root or that were derived from
verbal roots. ...
Do you need to "learn" something here? Both )LP and LMD are well
attested verbal roots meaning "learn". BDB derives )ELEP "cattle" from
the former root, and the letter name alef is certainly from "cattle".
Similarly the letter name lamed seems to come from a word meaning
"ox-goad", Hebrew MAL:MED, which can easily be derived from the verbal
root LMD. Samekh "pillar" is also rather obviously derivable from the
verb SMK "support". I'm not sure about the others, but these three
apparent counter-examples show that your "all" is not accurate. So this
would put paid to any argument that the letter names are all loan words.