On Tue Mar 16 06:24:10 EDT 2010. Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
>Hello Steve,
Hello Yitzahk,
>In my opinion, your etymology is no less idiosyncratic than Isaac's.
Although I respect your opinion, I believe that
you correctly qualified it as an "opinion." OTOH,
you then go on to express what I think is a
misplaced sense of certainty about it's validity.
>Tet is not "probably" a reflex of Taw. Tet is no doubt NOT a reflex of Taw.
In retrospect, perhaps "reflex" wasn't the best
word. However, in antiquity Tet and Taw seem to
have been as frequently confused within and
between languages as they are today, and I've
just given you what I think are valid reasons for
believing that Pe-Tet and Pe-Tav were variants
that resulted from this confusion.
One can, if he wishes, consider the Identity
Pe-Tav/ open = Pe-Tet/open a coincidence.
However, in the empirical and legal sciences, the
difference between relevant evidence and
coincidence is that the former can be logically,
instructively and predictively united, whereas
the latter cannot; and I think I just united
Pe_Tav Pe-Tet in a logical, instructive and predictive way.
> The root PTR "to interpret" in Modern Hebrew
is from Aramaic. The equivalent Hebrew root is
P$R, indicating the original NWS root is
p-th-r. /th/ (as in English "thin") developed
into Shin in Hebrew and Taw in Aramaic.
I think that the issue is far more complex than
you make it out to be, and that the confidence
you express here is therefore a little misplaced,
for reasons I recently pointed out in the
following passage of an article titled "The
Mysterious Ekron Goddess Revisited (JANES 31:1521, 2009)
"It should also be noted that ptr has a number of
obvious relatives in Hebrew and a host of other
Semitic languages. For example, its sibilated
form pr refers to, among other things, releasing
people from curses, exorcisms, and sins in, for
example, Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian, though
Sperling chose to believe that Hebrew ptr is not
related to Aramaic or Akkadian pr. (S.D.
Sperling, "Studies in late Hebrew lexicography in
light of the Akkadian." Dissertation. Columbia
Univ. New York, 1973).
In any case, clearly related to ptr is also pthr,
most notably in Pethor the birthplace of Balaam,
the seer that Numbers 22-24 and Deuteronomy 23:4
curses for leading Hebrews astray. Although
scholars have often identified Pethor as Pitru
(W.F.. Albright, "Some important recent
discoveries: alphabetic origins and the Idrimi
statue." BASOR 118: 11-29, p. 15, N. 13.) Yaure
argued convincingly that this relationship is far
more complex, because Pethor was originally:
. . . pathorah, a regular nomen agentis form of
the verbal root ptr (to interpret'). This
Aramaic title, pathorah = The Interpreter', (
sc. of dreams and oracles), distiguished Balaam
as a professional and reputed diviner, and had
been taken over unaltered into the Hebrew
narrative, and then was by later transcribers
easily mistaken for a Hebrew locative, since both
were written with identical letters. Accordingly,
the original text of Num 22:5 must have been some
plain statement such as: He sent messengers to
Balaam ben Beor the pathorah to call him . . .
(L. Yaure, "Elymas-Nehalamite-Pethor," JBL (1960)
79: 297-314, particularly 310-314.)"
Yaure went on to argue that Jerome must have
recognized that pathorah was Balaam's epithet,
for the Vulgate translates pathorah as hariolus,
just as the Jerusalem Targum states: He sent
messengers to Laban the Aramean who is Balaam; .
. . his place of residence is Padan, which is
Pethor, so-called after his name pathor
helmaiia." By the same token, the Peshitta
translates pathora as paora Interpreter',
because, as Yaure put it, "the Syriac translator
of Numbers easily saw in the term in question a
well known Aramaic expression and accordingly
rendered it in his own cognate language with the
related and idiomatic paora (interpreter'). .
>3) The root R)Y is a triconsonantal root.
I apologize, but my Email program (Eudora) does
not allow me to read or write in Hebrew, and I'm
not familiar enough with the symbols people are
using here to know which root (R)Y) you're referring to?
\>The use in your theory of the term
"Afro-asiatic" is inappropriate as you only take
into consideration Modern Hebrew.
Indeed, the moment one includes Aramaic and
Arabic (both in Central Semitic) one sees that
there is no "widespread Afro-asiatic root PTR"
You're right. The root was deducibly originally
PT, not PTR, and I could go on to argue
convincingly I believe that the same root is
ancestral to scores of Indo-European words that I
recently discussed in an article "Deconstructing
Grimm's laws reveals the foot and leg symbolism
hidden in Indo_European languages. (Semiotica. 171:265290, 2008).
However, doing so would here take us well beyond
the present issue and this list's scope.
> or "widespread Afro-asiatic root R"
On the contrary, if you look, for example, at
Gabor Takacs' Egyptian Etymological Dictionary',
you'll see on page 136 a section "Egyptian *R =
Semitic *R = Afro-Asiatic *R, and scores of words
that were inferribly derived from that root. If
you then compare, say, Heb "horah" for a circular
dance to the AA words Takacs gives for dancing,
you'll see that they are all logically cognate.