Thank you - nexus -ūs.
The words within what I'm calling a semantic nexus are related in as much
as a speaker can relate one to another as dependent on one another or can
relate them by semantic similarity. So a noun in the form of the active
participle is related to the qal form, but may have other secondary meanings
that won't magically feed back to the verb. And the speaker can use the
resources of the language to create new words, so the unattested hiphîl of
lāHam could be used by a speaker as a one-use word (assuming it wasn't in
use anyway), just as we might form a verb from a noun, 'to Blair something
up', to make political capital out of something, say.
The semantic nexus round leHem comprises the noun 'bread, food' and
the qal in the sense 'to eat' found for example in Proverbs 4:17 (כי
לחמו לחם רשע ויין חמסים ישתו). Round מלחמה is that noun 'battle'
and the niph'al 'to fight' (and the qal in the two times it is
used in the sense 'to fight', both times poetically in Psalms).
Neither nexus as we have them contains words that are dependent on one another,
so they can be grouped only be sense.
As for connections between these two nexuses, might I suggest it's
irrelevant for Hebrew? The distinction between לחם and מלחמה seems to go back
to Proto-West-Semitic, and has no bearing on Hebrew (or Aramaic, I think).
Arabic, as I showed, has interestingly (re)connected the two nexuses, easier
when لحم means 'meat'.
John
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