Lexical Root vs. Substantive Root: The Status of the Hebrew Alphabet As A Precursory System for Menaḥem Ben Saruq's Root Concept
| Autor: | Luba R Charlap |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
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| Zdroj: | Journal of Semitic Studies. 65:419-434 |
| ISSN: | 1477-8556 0022-4480 |
| Popis: | Menaḥem ben Saruq (Spain, tenth century) is considered to be the first scholar to write a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew - called the Maḥberet - on Spanish soil. His role in the development of Hebrew grammar, however, has not been given pride of place in the scholarly literature. Renewed interest in his theory arose only in the late twentieth century. As some scholars have noted, Menaḥem was the first to reveal the three-consonantal basis of Hebrew roots. This article will continue to establish the basis for this concept, while further elaborating on several emphases in his teaching, especially in the context of the distinction between the radical and the servile letters and their subdivision, which, in our view, led Menaḥem to formulate his root concept. Following our analysis, we note a difference between the ‘lexical root’ concept, by which he arranged the entries in his Maḥberet, and the ‘substantive root’ concept on which he based his innovation. A parallel idea can be seen in the theory of Yusuf Ibn Nūḥ, who set forth the jawhar concept, which means the basic entity of a word on the abstract level (as opposed to a word-based morphology), as Geoffrey Khan has shown. The article concludes with a clarification of the difference between Menaḥem's theory and that of Judah Ḥayyūj. Despite the enormous development made by Menaḥem, he was not able to offer a coherent morphological system, as Ḥayyūj did. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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