Rishon Rishon

Four-letter roots

Amritas has a very interesting post on onomatopoeic and emotive words in Japanese and Korean. It inspires me to write about the subject too! My general impression is that Hebrew has a huge number of verbs that sound like their action. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time you have frequently heard about Hebrew three-letter roots. However, Hebrew also has a large number of four-letter roots. These roots have limited productivity: out of seven verbal paradigms, only two can accommodate four-letter roots, and out of several hundred (my guess) patterns, only a handful can accommodate them. Luckily, the two verbal patterns, pi`el and hitpa`el, are for transitive and intransitive verbs respectively, so any action can potentially be expressed by a four-letter root. (Hebrew verbs never do double-time as both transitive and intransitive verbs, e.g. walking to school and walking the dog are two different words: halakh and holikh respectively. The only exceptions are the words for the five senses, which mostly work like English: Your dog has no nose, how does he smell? – Awful!)

There are three sources of four-letter roots. First, there are imported words, e.g. irgen (ארגן – organize. You may be familiar with this root from the Irgun – the Organization, short for Irgun Sva’i L’umi – National Military Organization). There is also a native mechanism for extending three letter roots by adding an extra root letter, usually adding a ’, m, sh, or t as the first letter of the root, or doubling the last letter. Compare: pisher – compromise, ifsher – enable; safar – count, misper – number; `avad – work, shi`abed – enslave; hazar – return, shihzer – recreate; dalaq – burn, tadleq – fuel (e.g. a car); sarat – scratch, sirtet – draw (a picture).

Finally, there’s the source I really want to get to: roots of the form XYXY. There must be hundreds of roots of this form; very frequently they are onomatopoeic. Here are a few: milmel – murmur, rishresh – rustle, sifsef – chirp, gilgel – roll, silsel – curl, zimzem – buzz, tishtesh – make blurry, tiqteq – tick, type, tiftef – drip.

I have given just the pi`el verbs that are formed from these roots (notice that they all have the pattern XiYXeY), but most have hitpa`el (hitXaYXeY) forms as well, e.g. hitgalgel – roll, intransitive. You can also make nouns, most often with the pattern XaYXaY, e.g. galgal – wheel, zamzam – buzzer.

UPDATE: Amritas also notices the similarity between the opening of the mouth to make the p sound, and the meaning of the Japanese word paku – open. The Hebrew word also begins with this letter: patah – open.