-
Hebrew Key-Letters
- Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 21, Number 4, Summer 2003
- pp. 85-114
- 10.1353/sho.2003.0040
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This article uses mostly ignored facts about Hebrew to propose a major addition to the theory of the Hebrew root (and root-morphemes generally), and a radical solution to the lexical problem in linguistics: the fact that native speakers of a language acquire and subsequently access tens of thousands of words (and that knowledge of a significant part of these words is required of foreign learners).
Initial single-consonant submorphemes are proposed as a new (quasi-) systematic structure within lexicon, most clearly seen in Hebrew. More specifically, it is proposed that 16 Hebrew initial consonants provide a semantic clue to the meaning of the root, in the form of a small set of basic meanings (one "original" one branching out to several basic ones). These clues help to learn and access a large vocabulary, whether for the native or non-native speaker.