Schubert wrote:I'd been following this thread with some confusion about the relevance of equating BH words with Greek words. I was uncertain whether or not my lack of clarity about the discussion was the result of a failure to understand some underlying issue. If there is some underlying issue, it would be helpful for me to have it spelled out.
John:
There’s no relevance to equating BH words with Greek words. At times there are similarities, but more often differences outweigh similarities. What similarities there are can either be attributed to loan words or even just chance. One of the clues that we deal with loan words is that the BH word has no verbal or “primitive” root in Hebrew.
Even comparing close cognate languages can be problematic, for example שכח in BH means “to forget” while in Aramaic, a close cognate language, it means “to find”. Comparing across language families just doesn’t make sense.
The gold standard in the evaluation of any language is how it is actually used. Even those using standard linguistic practices who disagree with me on particulars or some of my conclusions, yet they agree with me on methodology. I use exactly the same methodology in evaluating and learning modern languages as I use in studying and learning Biblical Hebrew. In both, the etymological fallacy is to be avoided.
There’s a person who posts more messages on this list than do I, yet when I look and see that he’s the author of a post, I ignore and skip over that post without reading it. If he starts a thread, I refuse to open that thread. That’s why I never answer his posts, because I no longer read them. (This post may be when Isaac Fried learns why I never respond to anything that he writes.)
The reason I ignore his posts? It’s because his whole schtick is based on the etymological fallacy. And not the standard etymological fallacy for Biblical Hebrew, looking for a triliteral root. I tried showing him from giving examples from actual use that his theory doesn’t fit the real world, but he refused to listen. I then decided that it would be best just to ignore him.
From the above posts, it appears that you subscribe to an etymological fallacy, one that goes beyond what even Isaac Fried pushes. One of the problems within Biblical Hebrew is that there are many words that are written the same, but come from different roots, and that’s just the words that have etymological roots. All languages have homonyms that sound the same, but have very different meanings. Written Biblical Hebrew doesn’t include the vowels (the vowels we find in written copies comes from a later time over a thousand years after the last native speaker of Biblical Hebrew passed away) so it has even more homographs. Just because two or more words sound or are written the same, does NOT automatically mean that they come from the same root. For example, in English, we have four different words from different roots pronounced tū with three different spellings because English isn’t spelled phonetically. The word “strike” has two roots, a true homonym. And now you’re trying to say that words from different languages because they sound the same or similar therefore have the same roots? Don’t you see that sometimes you ignore how words are actually used in order to support your theory?
So if your whole schtick is etymology, including the etymological fallacy, should I ignore you too?
Saboi wrote:I studied the Septuagint alongside the MT and did a word by word comparison
and that how i noticed how seemingly similar they are, word and grammar.
This sentence proves that you didn’t study the MT.
The grammars are very different—koiné Greek’s verbs are conjugated according to tense, Biblical Hebrew’s conjugations are modal. That’s just the beginning of differences.
Then many of the words that you claim are equivalent because of their similarity in sound have very different definitions. So you change definitions in order to force square pegs into round holes. Some of the words don’t even sound the same nor can be made to have similarities through recognized linguistic substitution patterns.
From now on, I should just ignore you, and encourage others also to ignore you. Do you agree?