I am sorry to say, but you are, following the fallacious and confused
lead of the so
called Linguists, תועה בשדה roaming the fields. All you say,
following the linguists
with their silly computer programs, is irrelevant to Hebrew. The
situation in Hebrew
is obvious even without these parroting "computer programs".
1. First we observe that all the attachments אותיות השמוש
to a Hebrew word are
adhered distinct words, namely,ZE, $E, LE, BE KE.
2. All other attachments are personal pronouns for an act (in a verb)
or for a thing (in a noun).
3. The insertions U and I (as well as E and O), essentially HU and
HI, are likewise
personal pronouns.
4. Stripped of these, the Hebrew word reveals its bare root (root!).
5. Take, for instance, the root GML (or GAMAL, with an A added so
that the root my be sounded).
Examining all Hebrew roots (as I did in my book: the Analytic and
Synthetic Etymology of the Hebrew Language)
one realizes that the root itself is a composition of more
fundamental elements, or building blocks.
These are existence markers and a plurality marker (as are the
English: be, is, on, are, all, of, at, etc.).
6. Namely, the root GAMAL consists by itself of the combination of
the single consonant
roots GA-AM-AL. In this, GA is the essence of גאה GAAH, MA is the
essence of מאה MAAH,
and AL (or LA) is the essence of עלה ALAH, or לאה LAAH. The
beast גמל GAMAL
is thus "the massive and lofty thing".
7 Enters reason, understanding, imagination, as well as shared
experience, and extends
the root to kindred images, both tangible and abstract. Thus, from
GML Hebrew generated
also גמול GAMUL, 'developed, weaned', and גמול GMUL, 'reward'.
8. Other languages or dialects may variously apply this root to
similar situations. Say the
Arabic names GAMIL (JAMIL as they prefer to pronounce it) and
GAMILAH, 'the beautiful,
the accomplished, the ample and tall, the fully developed'.
9. Now that we have accomplished the reconstruction of Hebrew from
its elementary constituents
we have reached the very essence of the language; this is the very
"proto" language. There can be
nothing more "proto" than this.
Isaac Fried, Boston University
On Feb 24, 2013, at 7:15 PM, Will Parsons wrote:
Hi Isaac,
First of all, thank you for bringing the subject back to Hebrew, since
neither my reply nor the post I was responding to mentioned Hebrew,
but were addressing more general linguistic matters.
On Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:05:00 -0500, Isaac Fried <[email protected]>
wrote:
Would not Hebrew be better since it needs barely a reconstruction?
I don't see how. The question is, how far is it possible to
reconstruct an assumed proto-language on the basis of modern, purely
spoken descendents, and how far one can verify such a reconstruction.
Hebrew of course is considered part of the Semitic family of
languages, part of a larger Afro-Asiatic family. How would the
computer reconstruction work here? Unlike the scenario of the article
using the Austronesian languages, where one has a multitude of modern
languages/dialects, but essentially no historical written evidence,
the situation of the Semitic languages seems to me to be precisely the
opposite.
One has a dearth of Semitic languages that have survived to modern
times. Of course, Arabic has been a huge success, dividing into a
spectrum of modern spoken dialects unified by a common literary
language (somewhat similar to the position of early Romance dialects
vis-à-vis literary Latin in mediaeval times). I'm not sure about the
situation of the African branch of the Semitic languages (i.e., the
descendents of Ge`ez), but in the Asiatic branch, first Aramaic seems
to have eclipsed other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and
Akkadian, and then Arabic eclipsed Aramaic.
Modern Hebrew is of course the "other" modern Asiatic-Semitic
language, apart from Arabic, but because of its revivification, does
not make itself an ideal candidate for historical comparison. (I
understand that Aramaic still survives, but I suspect has been heavily
Arabicized, and may be of marginal status).
On Feb 24, 2013, at 1:57 PM, Will Parsons wrote:
The good test case is that of the Romance languages
--
Will Parsons
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