>>So you have by logical deduction based on Roget's Thesaurus come to a
>>conclusion that "open" and "gullible" are synonyms in English, which
>>in fact is not the case.
I wish you would have told me that before I took
the time to examine the evidence that caused me
to conclude the opposite, as I never would have wasted my time.
>> Second, Greek "anastomow" 'to open up' was derived from Gk "stoma"
>> 'mouth' evidently to identify the relatively abstract notion of
>> opening with the physical act of opening the mouth
>And how is this relevant to Biblical Hebrew?
As Carl Buck repeatedly showed in his "Dict. of
Selected Synonyms in The Principle Indo-European
Languages,' and a multitude of others linguists
showed elsewhere, a wealth of evidence reveals
that ancient wordsmiths often used the same
associations to derive one word from another or
the same word root. Hence any logician would
recognize that etymologies showing how words for
gullibility and opening evolved from words for
the mouth in other languages can be logically
invoked to support the assertion that Hebrew PTH
gullible, open' was derived from Pe mouth'.
.> This analysis therefore strongly suggests, if not clearly reveals,
>> that PTCH and PTH are as cognate as they clearly reveal because PTCH
>> was coined to associate creating a vacuous, open or empty condition
>> with opening the mouth, and 2) PTH to refer to the corresponding
>> psychological condition.
Will Parsons wrote:
>Again, highly speculative. Apart from the semantic difficulties that
>Karl has brought out (and with which I agree) there are phonological
>problems that cannot be simply glossed over. One cannot simply equate
>PTCH/PTH, PTY, and PQCH without justifying the phonological transformations
>that would be necessary to derive one from another.
The phonological transformations are transparent
at least to me. The original root "Pe" mouth,
opening' had at least two extended forms PQ and
PT, The latter had 1) a terminally velarized,
variant PTCH that referred to openings in the
physical sense, and 2) a terminally aspirated
variant PTH that referred to the corresponding
psychological and spiritual condition.
Whereas I now realize that Gesenius was evidently
implying as much when he simply said that the
roots were akin', I would now go beyond Gesenius
by further associating PTCH and PTH with 1) PTR
to set free, open' and 2) PD to ransom,
deliver, redeem', considering the following axioms, facts and deductions:
1) Implicit in the concepts of ransoming,
delivering, and redeeming a person is the concept
of opening that which holds the person captive;
2) The voiced and unvoiced dental stops (D & T,
respectively) were inferribly as related to each
other and to the inter-dental affricate (Th) in
Biblical Hebrew as they were in Indo-European
languages wherein, for instance, Latin "pater,
German faeder, and, Eng father were all derived from the same root.
3) Occham's Razor, which in this case holds that
it is more hypothetically economical to accept
the theory that the foregoing, radically
identical words are also semantically identical
or readily associable because they were derived
from a single root that began with Pe and ended
with a dental stop than to accept the theory
that the words were derived from different roots
that coincidentally begin with Pe and ended with dental stops.
The only question in my mind is when and how
did changing the way the abovementioned dentals
were voiced and terminally aspirated or velarized
transform opening in the physical sense to
opening in the psychological sense and/or setting
free or ransoming in the minds of the people who heard the words.
>> I think we can then go even deeper into this linguistic gestalt by
>> recognizing, as Isaac Fried did, that "The root PTX is apparently a
>> variant of . . . PSG, PSX, PCX, P$X, P$Q, (PSQ), PTX with acts
>> connoting 'spread'.
Will Parson continued to write:
>I'd like to have more real evidence that these are related than a vague
phonetic similarity.
The phonetic similarities aren't vague at all. 1)
S and $ are generally recognized as palatalized
reflexes of T in many of the world's languages,
including the Semitic, and 2) G, X, and Q are
velar stops that frequently interchanged in the
same and other languages; cf "index", "indicate,"
and "digit,' all of which were derived from the same root.
One can, of course, simply deny any and all
evidence that these relationships existed in
Biblical Hebrew, too. But I can't understand why
a reasonable person would want do that if
accepting the relationships can 1) reveal why the
words are semantically identical or readily
associable, and 2) show that ancient Hebrew
wordsmiths intuitively used the same associations
that ancient Greek and Germanic wordsmiths used
to derive words for opening and gullibility from words for the mouth.
Isaac Fried then wrote:
> In Gen. 3:7 PAQAX is used to the parting of
the eyelids to expose the pupil (indeed, in the
extended sense of understanding what one
sees), while in 1Ki 8:29 the verb PATAX is used
for it. In Dt. 15:8 PATAX is used for the parting of the fingers of the hand.
In addition, I can't understand why anyone would
choose to interpret PAQAX in Genesis 3:7
circuitously as "parting of the eyelids to expose
the pupil" when the verb can be and, thus, has
been ubiquitously interpreted as an obvious
reference to opening the eyes. The former
interpretation thus obfuscates the fact that
parting and separating are nothing but forms of
opening, Hence the phrase "spreading the legs" is
tantamount to the phrase "opening the legs up".
Will Parsons wrote:
>A lot of phonetic similarities can be
attributed to simple coincidence, especially when
>what are being compared are sequences of three consonants only.
In trial law the difference between evidence and
coincidences is that the former can be logically
linked in a way that reveals intent, whereas the
latter can't be, and in this case, the verbs in
question can indeed be logically linked in a way that reveals intent.
Finally, let me say that there is no need to show
that TAW invariably corresponds to Qoph to prove
that PQ is cognate with PT if PQ and PT are the
extended forms of Pe they evidently are -- any
more than it was necessary to show that *n
inviolably corresponds to *t when Latin mensis
month' and Latin metiri measure' were
attributed to the same Proto-Indo-European root
root *me-. In both cases, the original roots were
deducibly, originally monoconsonantal.
Of course, Descartes's evil genie could have led
me to believe that everything I've deduced here
is false. But in the absence of compelling
evidence and arguments to that effect, I have no
reason to doubt the validity of my conclusions.