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From: Russell Hendel <rhendel@saber.towson.edu> Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 21:31:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: RE: Full Defective spellings Ben Katz continues the thread on full-defective spellings in v33n68 He writes >I believe Dr. Hendel's distinction is interesting but irrelevant. No >amount of cleverness can cover up the fact that Migdol (as is true of >many other keri/ketive words; "havtze" in Bereshit comes to mind) is not >a Hebrew word. Excellent error. In fact without any cleverness you can simply open up a Konkordance and see that MIGDOL does occur twice (Ez29:10 and Ez30:6) Furthermore the word MIGDAL (With a Kamatz vs a cholam) occurs about 2 dozen times. In other words I reassert what I said originally---problems of spelling only emerge if one does not check the facts. >And despite Dr. Hendel's assertion, there are about 5 >thousand keri/ketiv variants in Tanach, NOT EVEN COUNTING "adonai" for >"yhvh" and "yerushalayim" for "yerushlaim" (the latter of which only >appears, I believe 4 times with the final "yod"). Another excellent error! Does Ben Katz really believe that substituting adonai for the tetragrammaton(for reasons of respect) is NOT a reasonable explanation. To put it another way, Ben Katz has looked at 5000 spellings and has made a determination that since HE can't explain SOME of them THEREFORE NONE of them have any reason! Surely this is incorrect. I would respectfully submit that we should start the discussion by agreeing on WHICH cases (like adonai-tetragrammaton) have reasonable explanations and which don't Russell Jay Hendel; Phd ASA Dept of Math; Towson Univ Moderator Rashi is SImple http://www.RashiYomi.Com/calendar.htm CHECK OUT THE NEW RASHIYOMI calendar