*All linguistic terms used in this book are explained in the glossary beginning here.

*The letter 3 corresponds to gh in modern orthography: fortho3t = ‘forthought’. At the time, it was pronounced more like the ch in Scottish loch or German Buch. The letter ð corresponds to th in modern orthography.

*Arabic has weakened the original Semitic p’s into f’s, following a well-trodden path which has also been traversed by the Germanic languages (Grimm’s law from Chapter 3). This is why the equivalent to the Akkadian root p-t-1 appears in Arabic as f-t-1. What makes Arabic somewhat unusual, however, is the thoroughness of the change. Absolutely all the p’s in the language were weakened to f’s – no p was left unturned – so that Arabic is one of the few languages in the world which lacks the sound p altogether.

*Incidentally, in modern Hebrew the process of swelling seems to be entering a new stage, since today, many verbs with four consonants are emerging in the language, through a similar process. For example, a verb ašev ‘compute’ is made into a noun ma-šev ‘comput-er’, and this in turn is made into a verb again e-ma-šev ‘(I will) comput-er-ize’. The original verb had three consonants -š-v, but the new one has four: m--š-v. Many other new verbs are appearing in this way, and the number of four-consonant roots is now growing.