Hi Nir, On Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:33:10 -0300, "Nir cohen - Prof. Mat." <[email protected]> wrote: > isaac, > > ET in hebrew is a preposition (similar to MIN, EL, (AL, LIFNEY etc) > and a marker for direct object, and as such it is not specified for > gender or number. it is the same ET for everybody. > > now, AT, ATAH, HEM etc is a personal pronoun, and is specified for > both gender and number. > > i think you confuse the two. now, i admit that it is logical to see > the pronoun as linguistically derived from the preposition > (precisely by gender and number speciation). thiere is room for much > speculation here. > > probably, H* was used as the primordial semitic 2nd and 3rd pronoun, > from which we still have in hebrew HU, HI, HEM, HEN.
It's not universal in Semitic - e.g., Akkadian has forms for the 3rd personal pronouns beginning with <sh-> rather than <h->. > the question of ATAH, AT, ATEM, ATEN is less understood. one would > like to conjecture a dative origin (thus, ATAH is ET-H*) for them, > which became nominal later; but then there is the problem of the > truly hebrew dative forms (OTKhA, OTAKh etc). here, the situation > is less clear. I don't think it's tenable to derive (e.g.) אתה (/'atta:/) from את + הו (/'e:t/ + /hu:/). The pronoun /atta:/ corresponds to forms in other Semitic languages that have an internal /nt/, such as the Arabic form ﺍﻧﺖ (/'anta/), whereas forms such as אתי (/'o:ti:/) pretty much exclude the possibility of the preposition /'e:t/ having an original /nt/. (We would expect to see a form with a daghesh in the taw if that were so.) -- Will Parsons _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
