User talk:Msheflin/Archive1

Hi Michael,

Followed up on your question at Ugaritic alphabet. kwami (talk) 19:10, 26 September 2009 (UTC)


 * teşekürlër Michael Sheflin (talk) 19:12, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

A Testament to My Own Stupidity
I removed this from the Solutions and Suggestions... section of Talk:Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets page, as I thought the page was already so cluttered from my dribble it did not need a self-defeating series of posts.


 * Talk... don't do. (I haven't edited anything on the article...).  What I have edited (since you already undid everything prior to the last few days):  I removed an ad to Colless's blog in the "Literature" section.  I also removed two non-working links to University of Chicago "material."  I got a security issue with both pages.  I add an exception to the server, I get the following messages:


 * For: # Ugaritic script (Brian Colless - version 1):


 * (Not Found


 * The requested URL /pipermail/ane/2004-November/015436.html was not found on this server.

Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at lists.uchicago.edu Port 443)


 * For: # Ugaritic script (Brian Colless - version 2):


 * (Not Found


 * The requested URL /pipermail/ane/2004-November/015476.html was not found on this server.

Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at lists.uchicago.edu Port 443)


 * I noticed you reversed this? Why would Ugaritic script be here and not under Ugaritic anyway?  I may also have removed these links from another article though (possibly Ugaritic I can't remember) for exactly the same reason.  And anyway this is a listserv... I don't know if that violates policy, probably not, but it's still a bit odd.  (to begin a second sentence with) And they don't exist... Michael Sheflin (talk) 01:45, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I'm wrong... I'll remove them now. Sorry if that seemed like an unfounded accusation. The history appears to show me as being wrong (so I guess I removed them from another article and not this maybe...). Michael Sheflin (talk) 01:52, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Michael Sheflin (talk) 02:22, 27 September 2009 (UTC)


 * If I reverted them, it was part of a blanket reversion, and not for that specifically. I also don't see much point in Ugaritic being there. kwami (talk) 06:31, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Middle Bronze Age Alphabets
Just my own two cents' worth: I am impressed by your enthusiasm and dedication to accuracy. I think your contributions are a valuable asset to the Wikipedia project as a whole, and it bothers me that you are talking about a permanent wikibreak. I have read many things by Kwami over the years, and have found him to be much like you: enthusiastic, prolific, concerned about accuracy. In other words, though he may seem like an adversary now, he's actually an ally. You both have the same objective, so I hope you can turn it to advantage. If you need a break, fine. Just don't give up on everybody because of a little tiff.

Years ago, I had much the same experience over Electrical network, something the rest of the world calls a "circuit." I found that the page was being guarded by a very enthusiastic electrical engineer. I see that this guy is still very active in Wikipedia, though he seems to have moved on to other topics. Kwami wrote the first version of the page in question, so maybe he has a bit more of a personal interest in the article than he should, but I don't see him as being thoroughly obstinate.

When I started my most recent job, one of my colleagues told me that in our company, change is needed, but change is glacial. I think Wikipedia is similar. One big difference, however, is that in companies and in traditional academia, change can be blocked by a single individual with territorial ambitions. Look at the case of Maya studies and Catherwood. In Wikipedia, what carries weight is the strength of the arguments, not the "credentials" of the proponent. This is what keeps me coming back.

Your improvements to this page, I think, will have to come one at a time, after what seems to be a painful amount of discussion. I would start with the citations, or maybe a link to where a person can find the other proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. Those things seem less controversial.

It's good to have you around. Don't give up on us yet. --Cbdorsett (talk) 02:46, 27 September 2009 (UTC)


 * lol. Hence I've been fired from every job requiring scholarship outside of direct academia (the Fates approach...). It's so hard to not find these discussions irrelevant though.  Believe me, I do actually appreciate Kwami's dedication for the reasons you mentioned.  The problem is (don't really bother doing this... seriously) if you look at my blog, firstly, until basically yesterday I was really only concerned with the Wadi el-Hol scripts.  Firstly because there's absolutely no scholarship on it; and secondly, because people like Colless haven't really had at it (but have in droves re: the other).


 * The reason I'm so discouraged is that I don't see myself moving that much further into other articles. People effectively use recursive citations that, when the stack is called in, look really good whilst falling flat on their ass.  I have made some minor edits/discussions on topics related to the poor quality of these individual letter evolution pages.  I actually have no problem working solely through the scholarship - in part because I am loosely connected to some Arabic linguists that represent a counter-trend to unproductive academia.


 * The other problem is, I have stumbled on a methodology that seems infinitely more scientific. Most of the scholarship in English does basically treat inscriptions as if they're Hebrew.  In this, Colless is unabashedly in favor of the neo-Orientalist idea (this is largely why I stopped emailing with him) that this is all just 1-step prior to Hebrew (for why this is wrong, check out the Gezer Calendar transcriptions/translations (in the links).  Personally, I think Hebrew does belong in the analysis, but only as one language among many - granted with a higher probability of relevance than something like Tigray (but not necessarily and not in every case).  The reason I'd argue that all the stuff regarding Colless is infinitely worse than mine (and I am heavily advocating against mine as well) is that using the largest online database of etymology (the Tower of Babel - with quite a few impressive academic affiliations) I go through each bilateral possibility building up a larger and larger gloss of possibly present and well-attested words.


 * This is how I have arrived at how questionable the idea of the h1/h2 determinatives are - regarding the hillul connection from Canaanite. The Gezer Calendar, as a very early attestation of paleo-Hebrew and of 3000 year old Canaanite languages, has hillul written as kh-l - with a khaf (in Hebrew).  So... I mean again, I don't want to push this point in an editorial manner - in part because that claim was published by Darnell (but not cited on this page) - but I may eventually email that dude because frankly it's a ridiculous claim.  The table too is pretty much what Colless sent me... and somehow started mysteriously popping up in articles on Wiki with random references to his blogs in various places.  All very weird.  Nevertheless, Kwami is going to do what he wants, so at this point I think my blog is a better and more comprehensive resource for information and certainly for possible glosses and context.


 * Colless, probably even Albright, and maybe Darnell all have clear conflicts of interest. The first referred me to the Bible as a justification for his subject-matter of the inscription (which he took as being one long sentence with no grammar and the word w-n (a bastardization of w-y-n (wine/alcohol) which is Indo-European, borrowed late into Hebrew, and not actually attested in the passage of the Bible he sent me (it uses a different word - from an actual Semitic root).  So... I just personally see polemical and religious overtones omnipresent that I don't think should be.  Firstly, in the vertical Wadi inscription, there is either an ankh or (I think, personally) a depiction of the goddess Tanit (ironically who is referenced in the Bible as being worshiped by Semites near Thebes in South Egypt - but that's a supporting context and not a motivation for translating).  Without this depiction, it's probably really easy to believe that the scripts, because they are related to later Semitic scripts, are Judaic Hebrew... again the first appearance of that appears to be in Canaan at least 400 years later.  It's also easy to believe it's Judaic Hebrew if you take the Bible as having originally been in Hebrew; in that sense the Qur'an would be an equally valid contextual counterpoint in that (with all the names being changed - but not necessarily altered (i.e. linguistic divisions already present)) then you can't make a case that one modern language or another was spoken.


 * I appreciate the advice, it's all quite exhausting. But the problem with people like Kwami (this is very much not a personal attack) is that they edit so much stuff with such a broad spectrum of topics... and in his case, without specific knowledge regarding the actual topic matter... that it becomes difficult to follow the discussion that points out valid points and controversy.  So I figure at this point, take a few day break and see what Kwami's done to the page when I get back...  But even without that Wikipedia really is endemically screwed.  I like the lack of hierarchy, but it may point out some drawbacks of a loose hierarchical system.  Michael Sheflin (talk) 03:06, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Screw it, I took your advice and added three of the first citations... admittedly all to the same source that Kwami already criticized in discussion (the Tower of Babel... best website for this ever). Michael Sheflin (talk) 03:32, 27 September 2009 (UTC) ..twoMichael Sheflin (talk) 03:39, 27 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I've seen plenty of well respected scholarship, including stuff published in Science and Nature, that was absolute garbage. Stuff that makes you wonder if the editor was high on crack. Not to mention entire academic fields, like string theory and formal linguistics, with major funding and hundreds of scholars. So I wouldn't be surprised if any or all of these folks were full of it. But we never really got to that, because of the distraction of Arabic in the table, and deriving Arabic letters directly from Wadi el-Hhol, despite a couple-millennium gap with no attestation of those letters in Phoenician or Nabataean. Such a claim would require some serious citations, and needs to be in the History of the Arabic alphabet article before here. But that's tangential to the reliability or unreliability of Colless or Darnell. kwami (talk) 06:41, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Hold on speedy deletion
Hi, you can leave Wikipedia, but your talk page can remain. Bearian (talk) 00:53, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Time-sensitive question on History of the alphabet
What the heck does "dialectic" mean in this context? Does it refer to Hegelian metaphysics or what?? I literally have no idea. And in this context, does "cuneiform" mean Ugaritic alphabetic or Akkadian logosyllabic? If I don't get a reply in a day or so, then I'll firmly remove what is murkily unclear. AnonMoos (talk) 01:51, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Cuneiform in this context refers to logographic writing. Dialectic refers to a dialect of a language and not a Hegelian dialect or dialectical analysis.  I have never heard the claim made that Arabic has heavily informed Proto-Semitic.  However, if you read that article you will find citable evidence to the cross-comparison of Egyptian, Greek, and cuneiform translation.  Ugaritic writing is often called alphabetic(al) cuneiform.  And through Ugaritic transcription into cuneiform (originally Sumero-Akkadian writing) we have further phonetic vocalization clues.


 * The key is the exchange of writing systems and languages so that different comparative phonetic markers exist. As for removing it, feel free, but as it stood it was flatly a lie based on ignorance.  I would never use Wiki to research this subject; I just thought it might be nice if someone else could trust Wiki enough to actually use it as a fact-oriented encyclopedia... of sorts.  Michael Sheflin (talk) 12:08, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I apologize, that was a bit confusing. The article I am referring to is the Huehnergard and Rendsburg article I posted in the discussion page of Proto-Sinaitic.  There are a handful of phonetic reconstructions (like for Ugaritic, or Sumerian, Akkadian, etc.) but I have not seen any of them flatly claim to reconstruct phonetics based on Arabic.  For Proto-Semitic, Huehnergard is the man - and he mostly studies Akkadian and Ugaritic. Michael Sheflin (talk) 12:10, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Well "dialectic" is not most commonly an adjective form for "dialect" in most contexts, and it has very prominent divergent meanings which would be strongly distracting in many cases, so it should really not be generally used as an adjective form for "dialect" -- unless you know in advance that your audience will understand exactly what you mean (which is not the case for History of the alphabet). And Classical Arabic has kept 28 of the commonly-reconstructed 29 Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes distinct, and has been studied intensively in Western cultures since around the 17th-century, long before anyone knew anything about Cuneiform or Ugaritic.  Though the weight given to Classical Arabic in reconstructions of Proto-Semitic has diminished over the last 50 years or so, Classical Arabic was kind of the "Sanskrit" of Proto-Semitic -- the language which was was most heavily relied on in early scholarly attempts to reconstruct the proto-language in the 19th century... AnonMoos (talk) 15:10, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * P.S. Arabic was the only language accessible to 19th-century European scholars where they could actually hear as many as 27 distinct consonant sounds being pronounced which corresponded to 27 Proto-Semitic phonemic distinctions, which was also very important to the development of proto-Semitic work at the time (I say 27, because ظ and ض actually merged in all modern dialects). AnonMoos (talk) 15:20, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * My bad on dialectic. ض and ظ, while conflated in Arabic dialects, have not fully merged.  They are still separate in isolated cases in Egyptian - beyD, for instance (بيض) versus naZeef (نظيف).  The same is also true of ث and ت and س in Egyptian.  While the latter two more commonly interchange with the Classical Arabic ث, people would not normally confuse that in writing... That is largely the broader point I had been making. Michael Sheflin (talk) 15:25, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Maybe, but if a historic ض / ظ contrast (as opposed to a phonetic emphatic "d" vs. emphatic "z" contrast created by colloquial emphasis-spreading) survives systematically (beyond a few sporadic forms) in a non-classicizing or non-tajwid-influenced vernacular pronunciation, then it would contradict what I've learned about Arabic dialectology. In any case, I really don't think that 19th-century European scholars had access to more than 27 distinctly-pronounced phonemic Arabic consonant sounds which could be validly used for proto-Semitic comparative work -- which was still more than the number of consonant phoneme pronunciations relevant to proto-Semitic which were available to them from Jewish pronunciations of Hebrew, the Amharic pronunciation of Ge'ez, and liturgical pronunciations of Syriac (in the low 20's in each case)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:19, 13 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Well I feel the other conversation can discontinue on Proto-Sinaitic's talk page. And yes... it is nice.  However, though in the above example I was referring to Arabic phonetics to point out that Arabic has a voiced Dad - which is fair, Arabic is sometimes called لغة الضاد although this may be obscure.


 * However, in the other conversation I was repeatedly attempting to explain that I was not referring to Arabic. Please refer to this (http://krc.orient.ox.ac.uk/aalc/images/stories/mcam_ancient_north_arabian.pdf) .  My understanding is that, however voiced, four emphatics are reconstructed for Ancient North Arabian - this is probably the most likely source for a direct etymological Dad in Arabic - but what I have been referring to as North Arabian are these languages not Arabic.


 * As for ghayn, which is also the Ugaritic equivalent for the voicing interchange you mentioned above in Aramaic with 'ayn and Hebrew with S (Akkadian as well - in most cases; T may be used in some ; d/t may be used in one case (dilmun) - i say may). The Ugaritic ghayn had disappeared with Ugaritic perhaps 3-500 years before South Arabian pops up (Macdonald is publishing or has published a carbon dated small inscription on a twig to roughly 1000 BC (i forget the range)).  North Arabian arguably followed at some point thereafter.  The ghayn was voiced as h in Amarna Canaanite frequently, so it persisted probably at least to the time of North Arabian scripts - if one goes by Greek transliterations of the Bible in contrast to Aramaic or Hebrew.


 * In effect, the reality is that consonants affricated and did not as much disaffricate - please see Arabic Sad versus Hebrew Tzade ... These affrications follow the loss of voicings and characters. But that's not even the point.  I was talking about the North Arabian scripts - the dating of which is not clear, as well - and the retention of ghayn in these, South Arabian scripts, and Ugaritic scripts.  Basically, without concrete Sinaitic translations, the earliest alphabets have distinct ghayns not initially voiced as 'ayn in any alphabetical pre-Canaanite (post-Amarna) examples.  Can you provide one example of an 'ayn taking the place of an orthographic Common Semitic ghayn before Hebrew?  And if there is, for instance, one in Akkadian... that, by your logic, would not translate into evidence for letter-continuity.


 * So it would seem, essentially that the lack of evidence still falls back on the earliest solidly identified alphabets possessing three emphatics (the equivalent of Arabic (I apologize I do not have easy Hebrew keyboard access): ص / ض&ظ / ط - as in Ugaritic. The South Arabian alphabets possess four emphatics as do those in North Arabian.  These all possess three sibilants (S1/S2/S3), غ and ع disaffricated, and ذ and د disaffricated.


 * This does not affect pronunciation, only etymology and orthography - which are surprisingly stable since the origins of these corpuses. So where exactly do you see all this evidence for any effect of 19th century Orientalism on present-day research?  There is a truth... whatever it was believed that was 100 years ago may not so much affect scholarship today.  I suggest you download those other papers that you flatly refused to look at.   Additionally, I challenge you to counter the evidence I have provided that the earliest fully-understood alphabets possess (all of them) the consonants you deny, and maintain consistent orthographies across these scripts (please see Huehnergard for some of this throughout his work; also Albright (though dated) and to a lesser extent Wolf Leslau).  But the unprovable presence or non-presence of these characters in Sinaitic writing means that the earliest alphabets do in fact have at least 27 characters - with consensus unfounded on the nature of the Proto-Sinaitic corpus - should it be one.  That does not appear to be refutable... so I look forward to it.  Michael Sheflin (talk) 19:17, 13 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll actually offer you a piece of assistance since there is no way you'll be able to refute the above construct. Arabic (Classical and Modern Arabic - i.e. specifically اللغة العربية) may actually evidence one (there could be more but I am not aware of them) example of a Ugaritic ghayn transmitting as an Arabic 'ayn - thus possibly through a Canaanite phonetic and orthographic understanding.  However I suspect that in fact the Ugaritic orthography is a variant based on the Akkadian, Canaanite, and Arabian orthographies: Ugaritic 3*nb (غنب) > Arabic 3nb (عنب) "fruit, grape" > "grape" (Akk inbu and not hinbu reinforces that Ugaritic is the variant).  In almost every other case I am aware of where Ugaritic غ is not taking the place of ظ or ض, there is a one-to-one confluence of the Ugaritic غ and reconstructed Semitic غ - hence an Arabic غ as well.  Michael Sheflin (talk) 14:31, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Sorry I kind of got distracted by other things, but 1) I was including old North Arabian inscriptions as a less fully attested branch of South Arabian. 2) The more difficult a site is to use in my browser, and the more arbitrary hoops it makes me jump through before I can actually access any information, the less likely I am to access information from that site; this is just the way it is. 3) I still don't see any concrete specific evidence for a structural alphabetic connection between the written Ugaritic letter for ġ and the written Arabic letter ghayn (as opposed to a cognate etymological connection between the Ugaritic and Arabic ġ sounds, which is something completely different). How is the standard traditional accepted account (i.e. 21 of the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet borrowed to write Arabic, mainly by way of Nabatean, and later differentiated into 28 letters by the addition of diacritical dots) inadequate? AnonMoos (talk) 19:47, 29 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, this is a basically random list of Ugaritic words that contain ghayn (g/), and their Arabic, Akkadian, and Hebrew equivalents. Do you not notice a pattern?  Your point about vocalization is well taken, but that is actually the cause of the alternate orthographies in Akkadian (3 > V and 3* > h) and Hebrew and Aramaic (mostly 3/3* > V).  However, and you are not alone in conflating North Arabian scripts, there is a very murky history there that could be one hub of interchange.  The Ugaritic ghayn does structurally reflect the Arabic ghayn, whereas this is not exactly the case in Hebrew or Akkadian.  There is the case I mentioned, in which the Ugaritic ghayn is unique in g/nb; and there is also the case in which g/ is used due to interchange with ظ.

As for the inadequacy, this is really an empirical question. I have spent now hundreds of hours examining both photos of and in some cases the originals of basically the entire published Proto-Sinaitic corpus; including a number of inscriptions published obscurely or not published. Hopefully I will just cite myself to you shortly in answer to this argument; in the interim, I can only say that it is empirically false; it requires a highly selective and in many cases overtly erroneous (see the Dag / Dalet issue) interpretations of characters to fit a Canaanite origin - because many of these people are implicitly attempting to justify aspects of the Bible.

{| class="wikitable" ! Akkadian !! Ugaritic !! Arabic !! Hebrew !! Meaning
 * ba''u^ || bg/y || bg/w || || "to look for, seek"; Akk "to look for (or in), seek"; Ug "to ask, beg"; Ar "to seek, desire"
 * h_uph_uppu || g/bt || g/bb, h.bb, h.bybt, h.bh.b || abcbwch, bwch || "a flap of skin (esp. filled with fluid)" ?; Ug g/bt "milk" a drink; Ar g/bb "dewlap, wattle (flap of skin under the throat in some animals); to gulp down", h.bb "blister", h.bybt "small pimple or pustule", h.bh.b (Hejazi) "watermelon"; Aram gwbh, gwbta ? "duct, tube, small log"; Heb abcbwch, bwch < bh.bh. < h.bh.b "blister"
 * s.ah_a-tu || g/z.y || g/d.d. || cs.h, css ? || "to put pressure on"; Ak "press (fruit), pressure, oppress, blackmail"; Ug "entreat, seek favor, bribe"; Ar "to make fresh, g/d.yd. "succulent, juicy, tender"; Heb "entreat", also perhaps css "squeeze" and csysy "succulent"
 * || g/lm || g/lam || clm || "boy, youth"
 * quliptu || g/lp || g/lp || qlph || "husk, to envelop"; Akk/Heb "husk"; Ug. "husk, to envelop"; Ar. "to envelop"
 * enebu || g/nb || cnb || cnb || "fruit (Ug./Heb - also grape)"
 * s.eh_ru || s.g/r || s.g/r || s.cyr, zcyr || "to be young, small"; Heb s.cyr "young", zcyr "small"
 * || t_g/r || t_g/r, sg/r || $cr || "gate, opening (entrance)"; Ar "to breach, crevasse, gap between the two front teeth" < 'an opening', sg/r - "to be devoid of fortifications; vacant; empty"
 * s.amu^ || g/ma (z.ma), z.ma || d._ma || s.ma || "to thirst"; Akk s.amu^ "to be(come) thirsty, thirst for", s.u-mu "thirst"; Aram "unclean", 'one who wants for water with which to wash' ?; Ug. root (g/) undoubtedly renders etymological z.; It is likewise unclear whether OB immen & imminte and Sum emengi are related as no other examples of t._ being loaned into OB or Sum have yet been shown;  A case can and should also be made for the relationship of this root with s.wm "to fast, abstain from food and drink", suggesting then a Proto-Semitic (or AA) root of t._m "related to the root s.wm "to fast" < t._m "to want for food or drink" ?}
 * quliptu || g/lp || g/lp || qlph || "husk, to envelop"; Akk/Heb "husk"; Ug. "husk, to envelop"; Ar. "to envelop"
 * enebu || g/nb || cnb || cnb || "fruit (Ug./Heb - also grape)"
 * s.eh_ru || s.g/r || s.g/r || s.cyr, zcyr || "to be young, small"; Heb s.cyr "young", zcyr "small"
 * || t_g/r || t_g/r, sg/r || $cr || "gate, opening (entrance)"; Ar "to breach, crevasse, gap between the two front teeth" < 'an opening', sg/r - "to be devoid of fortifications; vacant; empty"
 * s.amu^ || g/ma (z.ma), z.ma || d._ma || s.ma || "to thirst"; Akk s.amu^ "to be(come) thirsty, thirst for", s.u-mu "thirst"; Aram "unclean", 'one who wants for water with which to wash' ?; Ug. root (g/) undoubtedly renders etymological z.; It is likewise unclear whether OB immen & imminte and Sum emengi are related as no other examples of t._ being loaned into OB or Sum have yet been shown;  A case can and should also be made for the relationship of this root with s.wm "to fast, abstain from food and drink", suggesting then a Proto-Semitic (or AA) root of t._m "related to the root s.wm "to fast" < t._m "to want for food or drink" ?}
 * || t_g/r || t_g/r, sg/r || $cr || "gate, opening (entrance)"; Ar "to breach, crevasse, gap between the two front teeth" < 'an opening', sg/r - "to be devoid of fortifications; vacant; empty"
 * s.amu^ || g/ma (z.ma), z.ma || d._ma || s.ma || "to thirst"; Akk s.amu^ "to be(come) thirsty, thirst for", s.u-mu "thirst"; Aram "unclean", 'one who wants for water with which to wash' ?; Ug. root (g/) undoubtedly renders etymological z.; It is likewise unclear whether OB immen & imminte and Sum emengi are related as no other examples of t._ being loaned into OB or Sum have yet been shown;  A case can and should also be made for the relationship of this root with s.wm "to fast, abstain from food and drink", suggesting then a Proto-Semitic (or AA) root of t._m "related to the root s.wm "to fast" < t._m "to want for food or drink" ?}
 * s.amu^ || g/ma (z.ma), z.ma || d._ma || s.ma || "to thirst"; Akk s.amu^ "to be(come) thirsty, thirst for", s.u-mu "thirst"; Aram "unclean", 'one who wants for water with which to wash' ?; Ug. root (g/) undoubtedly renders etymological z.; It is likewise unclear whether OB immen & imminte and Sum emengi are related as no other examples of t._ being loaned into OB or Sum have yet been shown;  A case can and should also be made for the relationship of this root with s.wm "to fast, abstain from food and drink", suggesting then a Proto-Semitic (or AA) root of t._m "related to the root s.wm "to fast" < t._m "to want for food or drink" ?}
 * s.amu^ || g/ma (z.ma), z.ma || d._ma || s.ma || "to thirst"; Akk s.amu^ "to be(come) thirsty, thirst for", s.u-mu "thirst"; Aram "unclean", 'one who wants for water with which to wash' ?; Ug. root (g/) undoubtedly renders etymological z.; It is likewise unclear whether OB immen & imminte and Sum emengi are related as no other examples of t._ being loaned into OB or Sum have yet been shown;  A case can and should also be made for the relationship of this root with s.wm "to fast, abstain from food and drink", suggesting then a Proto-Semitic (or AA) root of t._m "related to the root s.wm "to fast" < t._m "to want for food or drink" ?}

Michael Sheflin (talk) 20:41, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

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