Searching for loanwords (לל)

[Douglas Fyfe]

I was having a chat yesterday about loanwords and remembered this is something that came up in a seminar once but with no happy resolution. Accordance tagging gives (לל) = loan lexeme when a word's origin is surmised to be not Hebrew (but rather Phoenician, Akkadian, Arabic etc). There are some psalms for instance with a particularly high rate of loanwords, but short of hovering over every word, is there a way to search for that tagging, which could potentially turn up an interesting graph showing areas with high loanword frequency for further investigation? I know there's an amount of subjectivity and conjecture, but it would be at the very least a start.

[Ken Simpson]

Sure - just search for the root ll

 

i.e. type

+ll

in the search bar. Then you can analyse the results

 

You can do it in a construct search too. I will post a screenshot if you want to see it.

[Leopold Green]

Yes please that would be really interesting to see

[Mark Allison]

[Douglas Fyfe]

too easy. thanks. 

 

now I need a search which will scroll the first line of HALOT for the relevant lexemes to tell me which are likely loanwords even though they have a Hebrew root.

 

For instance, דלת is Hebrew for door, while the form דל (in Ps 141) is listed in HALOT as Phoenician.

So while there is a Hebrew root (which is allegedly, according to the tagging, דלה), it is a loanword, but a search for לל won't disclose it.

 

I guess this area is one where technology won't do my work for me!

[Ken Simpson]

Re the CONSTRUCT way of doing it....

 

[Ken Simpson]

19 hours ago, Douglas Fyfe said:

too easy. thanks. 

 

now I need a search which will scroll the first line of HALOT for the relevant lexemes to tell me which are likely loanwords even though they have a Hebrew root.

 

For instance, דלת is Hebrew for door, while the form דל (in Ps 141) is listed in HALOT as Phoenician.

So while there is a Hebrew root (which is allegedly, according to the tagging, דלה), it is a loanword, but a search for לל won't disclose it.

 

I guess this area is one where technology won't do my work for me!

Yeah sorry. If there's a way to do this it's beyond my ken (boom-tish).

[A.D. Riddle]

Douglas,

 

I do not think HALOT is saying that דלת, דל, or דלה are loanwords from Phoenician. It is giving cognates in other ANE languages. If HALOT thinks an entry is a loanword, they indicate with "lw."

 

For example, under דלת, they question if דל is a loanword from Akkadian with the notation "? Akk. lw."

 

A.D.

 

[Douglas Fyfe]

Thanks so much for chiming in @A.D. Riddle. 

 

If I may, to continue with the example of דל, which occurs only the once in the HB, isn't the suggestion that it's a Phoenician/Punic word which has a Hebrew cognate in דלת but when it occurs just as דל then it is a loanword (especially considering there is a regular Hebrew form and this form only occurs once)? 

 

To put it differently, what point does a lexeme cross the threshold between lw or not? 

[Douglas Fyfe]

Having another look at לשכה / נשכה towards the end of Nehemiah, both of them are tagged לל but in neither case does HALOT say lw. 

Yet for some tagged לל such as פחה (governor) HALOT does say loanword. 

 

Perhaps it's the case of Accordance tagging using one database and HALOT having a different standard (or a higher threshold; being more reticent to declare something a loanword).