It came from a book I’m reviewing for the Linguist List (www.linguistlist.org): Reading Hebrew: The Language and Psychology of Reading it, by Joseph Shimron (Erlbaum, 2006).

Shimron’s published other works on the topic, but he nicely brings it all together in this volume. His history of Hebrew language, at least up the pre-modern stage, and Semitic “alphabetic” writing (what I consider an “abjad” until the Tiberian pointing) is a bit rough around the edges, but the heart of the book (chps. 3-4) is the two chapters on experimental research that set out to discern the reality and role of the consonantal root, vowels, etc., and it is fascinating reading.

He doesn’t always connect the dots to things like I did with the possible reference to Anat and Ashera in Glen’s paper, but I think that the implications for our philological studies are often quite clear. In fact, it’s even made me wonder about how much I stress the vowel points in teaching Hebrew. Interesting stuff.

It was nice to chat a bit at the conference. I have just a quick clarification of my comment after Glen’s paper. I suggested that native Hebrew speakers don’t isolate roots in the same analytical way that we do. In other words, research suggests that roots have a reality, but perhaps not at the same surface as we often work with them. So, my comment was meant to suggest that for the allusions to be clear, we might not be able to assume that native speakers would have been able to separate the vowels from the consonantal root easily or quickly, and thus, emending the text in this case, as Wellhausen did, to “his Anat and his Ashera” is sensible if not preferable.

I wasn’t questioning word-plays, but rather whether the word plays can be root-only based (and even here in Hosea 14, of course, the root of Anat is not the same as the root for “Answer”).

Robert