The prefix ? is commonly asserted to be late and north Israelite. Bergsträsser refutes the evidence adduced for its northern provenance and argues that its frequency in later and absence in earlier texts stems from an editing of earlier texts that replaced it with ???. Under Aramaic influence, however, it finally supplanted the latter form. Syntactically, ? and ??? are constructed identically to introduce relative clauses, save that the former more frequently appears without a resumptive pronoun (sa'id in Arabic terminology) in the relative clause. Used as conjunctions, they differ only in that ? can combine with more prepositions. Thus, they are essentially identical syntactically. Bergsträsser refutes hypotheses asserting a common origin for ? and ???. The former clearly derives from proto-Semitic ta, of which reflexes are found in several Semitic languages. The latter comes from a noun meaning "place" that took on a demonstrative function and finally, under the influence of older inherited ?, became a relative pronoun. Gotthelf Bergsträsser was an Orientalist and Semitic linguist. His Einführung in die semitischen Sprachen remains a standard work.