10:21 PM 4/22/2012, Karl Randolph wrote: >>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. Regards William Schmidt _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
