[gothic-l] Re: Gothic "sa"

[Anthony Appleyard]

  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 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
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.

The {ha-gemination-} is the article.


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