Amritas talks about the hypercorrect (that is to say, incorrect) transcription of nakbah as naqbah. I was once informed by a woman whom I had momentarily found attractive that Munich was not pronounced the way I had pronounced it (myoonik) but “moonkhen”. I pointed out that I was using the usual English pronunciation, and that if she wanted to use the German she would have to also pronounce the umlaut over the U. More irritating, to me, are the multitudes that correct my pronunciation of Taoism. They want me to say “Daoism” when the Chinese pronunciation, as I understand it, starts with an unvoiced, unaspirated consonant – in other words, something between an English T (unvoiced, aspirated) and D (voiced, unaspirated). I’m sure; even then, that this would not be exactly as the Chinese pronounce it – as if a billion Chinese all pronounce it exactly the same way.
However, in this case, Amritas’s guess (“is this a derivative of naqaba 'he drilled'?”) is not necessarily incorrect. Semitic roots are morphological, not necessarily historical. Many Semitic roots seem to be derived by changing a letter of another root. The most famous such roots in Hebrew are p-r-X:
p-r-‘ – wild
p-r-d – separate
p-r-h – fruitful
p-r-z – exaggerate
p-r-h – flower
p-r-t – item
p-r-k – crumble
p-r-s – slice
p-r-` – plunder
p-r-s – break out
p-r-q – take apart
p-r-r – crumb
p-r-sh – separate, explain
All these roots have something to do with making many from one. We can also take one of these roots and start changing the middle letter:
p-r-` – plunder
p-q-` – split
p-g-` – wound
p-s-` – harm
p-sh-` – crime
p-t-` – surprise
Or change the first letter:
p-r-q – take apart
b-r-q – lightning
z-r-q – throw
h-r-q – insect
m-r-q – soup
s-r-q – comb
`-r-q – run away
sh-r-q – whistle
This phenomenon is the basis of the hypothesis that Hebrew once had two letter roots, three letter roots being a later development. I don’t take this seriously because it would give a theoretical maximum of only 484 roots – not nearly enough. Much more plausible, in my opinion, is that they come from changing a letter of an existing three-letter root. (Though sometimes this phenomenon can be shown to come through borrowing a cognate from another Semitic language.)
This particular case reminds me of Hebrew nashaq – bite, and nashakh – kiss. Since the root n-q-b appears in Hebrew, but not n-k-b, I would guess the latter is derived from the former.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at May 17, 2004 02:03 PM