Linguistic oddities / OT

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 909

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Aberforth's Goat" wrote:
<Aberforths_Goat at Y...> wrote:

> Come again?  I only know classical Hebrew & Aramaic.  (Or put 
> honestly, I've only forgotten classical Hebrew & Aramaic... ) 

I am sure you know more Hebrew than I do, and I never learned 
anything of other Semitic languages except when the Hebrew teacher 
gave an example of Arabic to show how much easier Hebrew is.

But I was enough struck by the three-letter stems to remember them. 
The three-letter stem gives rise to words without much caring whether 
those words are nouns or verbs. A very important word is DBR, 
because the only sentence I really know is Ani lo m'dabberit 
ivrit. Ani is the pronoun 'I', also the verb 'I am'. M'dabber(it) 
is the verb 'I speak' but also the noun 'speaker'. In another 
discussion long ago (actually, it was about what 'mujihaddin' means) 
I spoke of the M in front of the three-letter stem as 'reflective' 
(example I think it is Vav Resh Alef that is the root, 'to learn', or 
Torah 'the Teaching' and Moray, 'teacher') and people got on my case 
about a noun can't be reflective. But Moray is 'I teach' (reflective: 
I make learning) as well as 'teacher'.

And Mujihaddin are people who are making jihad. I would translate 
that as 'holy warriors' rather than 'freedom fighters', myself.