[Mesorah] "Teven" at the end of a pasuk

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2021 at 09:26:43PM +0000, Toby Katz via Mesorah wrote:
> "Pre-Hebrew"?!  Is that a thing?

Pre-Leshon haQodesh... I don't think so. Although I don't know how O
linguists make peace with the historical evidence vs Migdal Bavel.

But... LhQ evolved even during the time of Tanakh. Why would it not have
evolved in the time between Adam and Matan Torah?

Me, I see it as which line of the tree do you plan on drawing straight,
and which languages will you draw as branch points? Linguists care about
the set of phonemes, the morphology, grammar vocabulary, and other such
features. The Torah cares about ease of communicating different subsets
of truth.

So, LhQ is a single trunk that runs from Adam until at least Ezra,
perhaps Chazal, and perhaps some qedushah still remains in Rabbinic
Hebrew centuries after the last navi.

And yet it could also be true that Rabbinic Hebrew was less like some
pro-Semitic language than other languages are. Less like it -- in features
that matter less to its qedushah.

To me, LhQ is the language where "Torah" can be linked to both "hirayon"
and "moreh" and where we aren't trained to think that "yir'ah" is two
things (awe or fear). Where the noun and the present tense are the same
word (boneh = builder and also boneh = is building) because you are what
you do. Etc...

If Arabic retained more incidentals of early Semitic back when Sheim was
speaking Lashon haQodesh -- like retaining two forms of ches or ayin,
it still didn't retain the qeduushah.

So we draw our trees differently, but we should all be using the same line
segments representing the same splitting points and cross-influences. Just
drawn at different angles to each other depending on what's really
important to you.

(The sound you hear in the background is RSM trying to politely hold in
the laughter at my naivite and ignorant shouting.)

Gut Voch!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 Like a bird, man can reach undreamed-of
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   heights as long as he works his wings.
Author: Widen Your Tent      But if he relaxes them for but one minute,
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF    he plummets downward.   - Rav Yisrael Salanter