--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> <'elo:ah>, to be precise. It mean's simply 'god' and is a
derivative of Hebrew <'e:l> (Proto-Semitic *'il- 'god'), cf. "Allah".
>
> http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/S9.html
Accoding to Ben Yehuda, Modern Hebrew 'elo:ah means 'God',
not 'god'. I didn't think the word existed. Is it found in the
Bible? (I don't fancy investigating every occurrence of 'God' in a
translation.)
Arabic lah 'god' is apparently not attested in pre-Islamic Arabic.
> I suspect that it's some kind of back-derivative of the plural
(or "augmentative") <'elo:hi:m> (with a secondary <h>?), and that
it's formal femininity may be an accidental by-product of its
derivational history, but I know too little about Semitic etymology
to speculate further.
What's feminine about 'elo:ah?
Is there a good way of writing extra short vowels? The SAMPA
notation of suffixing '_E' is horribly ugly.
Richard.