George,
I am really, really sorry that you were offended by my choice of
words. I surely had no intention, be it the slightest, of
caricaturing your statement, except of recasting it into my own words
for the sake of my own apprehension.
For the record, I don't dispute the function of -UT. Our disagreement
is on its meaning. It is still my understanding that you are saying -
UT is inherently meaningless [except for it being an abstract
grammatical marker], while I contend it is a personal pronoun, or a
string thereof.
I would be greatly reluctant to comment on the formation of English
words, but it superficially appears to me that the suffix -ism is the
compound [via Latin etc., etc.] of the substantives is-am or is-in. I
am not sure what is the meaning of the suffix -tion, but in any
event, the consensus is that it is meaningless as a stand-alone.
I am also surprised and saddened by your qualification of my sincere
effort, be it extra consensual, to explain my ideas about the Hebrew
language as "condescending rhetoric".
Isaac Fried, Boston University
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