[gothic-l] Re: Gothic "sa"

[jdm314 at AOL.COM]

Oops, excuse the duplication... it was an accident.

<<In a message dated 10/11/00 3:30:36 AM, you wrote:

<<  keth at online.no wrote:-
> Another question that I'd like to pose, is why none of the translations
> have translated the little word "aleph-tau" that the Hebrew text has
> in front of ha-shamaim and ha-aretz. I have always assumed that it
> is the "ha" that is the article.

That word {'e:th-} seems to me to occur before objects of verbs in Biblical
Hebrew (I don't know what happens in modern Israeli Hebrew). >>

It occurs before direct objects, but only if they are marked with a definite
article (as Keth--sorry, don't recall your actual name!--probably noted), or
if they are names (proper nouns). Or at least this is the rule in Modern
Hebrew. I believe the rule in Biblical Hebrew is identical, though I'm sure
people could find counterexamples. Of course you could probably find
counterexamples in spoken Modern Hebrew too.
    Note that there is at least one translation that has it. I don't remember
the name of this translation, but it was a very literal translation of the
Hebrew into Greek, even more so than the Septuagint. I believe it was one of
the collumns in the Hexapla, but I could be mistaken. Surely someone knows
this, otherwise I can look it up. But I digress, the point is that this
literal translation rendered 'et as "ton" or "ten" (which is to say, the
article in the accusitive) when it was used with names, but since this didn't
work for the combination 'et ha-, as in Genesis 1:1, they used syn to:i, that
is to say they translated 'et as "with." This does not work in the vast
majority of sentences, though occasionally the word IS used this way (the one
example that pops to mind, oddly enough, was the Hebrew translation of the
New Testament I once saw, which rendered "and the word was with God" as
"v at hamilah hayah 'et 'Elohim"), especially when you add a suffix pronoun to
it: 'oti can mean either "me" or "with me." However "In the beginning God
created with the Heavens and with the Earth" sounds like an aweful
translation to me!
    In other words the best way to render that word is to just use the damn
accusative case and forget about it ;) There are precious few Indo-European
languages that even COULD translate that with a single word anyway.

<< It is likely an
accusative case prefix. It is likely derived from Common Semitic *{'inta-}
used (like Classical Arabic {'i:ya-)} as a carrier for object pronoun
suffixes >>

Ahah! So the same etymon as Hebrew atah, at, etc. (Meaning "you"), and
Egyptian ntk, ntf, etc. (meaning you, he)? I'd never heard that.
    BTW, the word is of course attested in Phoenician, spelled either 't as
in Hebrew, or sometimes just plain t! In Plautus' play Poenulus the Punic
equivalent appears to be spelled "yth." Scholars debate wheter the <y> here
represents an [u:] or a [@] (schwa). But that's not exactly relevent to this
list.


<< when they had to be used independently. Then likely it was extended from
pronouns to nouns when Hebrew lost the old Common Semitic case endings (-u
nom, -a acc, -i gen), to distinguish subject from object when the words in
the
clause had for some reason to be disarranged out of the usual SVO order. >>


This makes sense, though I can't think of any particular evidence.
    Hey! This is fun! Let's see how much Afroasiatic stuff we can get away
with before the Goths throw us off.


-IUSTEINUS
(Or rather Mosheh David...)


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