[b-hebrew] Pronounciation
Arnaud Fournet
fournet.arnaud at wanadoo.fr
Sun Jan 9 08:21:43 EST 2011
From: "Uri Hurwitz" <uhurwitz at yahoo.com>
>
> hey-khal
>
> The word originates, if memory serves, in Sumerian
> where 'e- gallo' means a large house. This in turn
> appears in Akkadian with the same meaning and then in
> various Semitic languages.
>
> Uri Hurwitz Great Neck NY
***
That word is very interesting.
We have in fact several phonetic snapshots of Sumerian.
S1. is reflected in Hurrian hai-galli
where h is a velar fricative
S2. is Hebrew hey-khal
with a weak laryngeal fricative.
S3. one more stage is Akkadian and Hurrian ay-akk-
where *Hay is ay with no initial at all.
ayakk-u/i is used for goddesses' temples: it's a (partly altered) Sumerian
genitive *hay-an-ak- "house-of"
S4. late stage is just conventional E- with muted-out h and ay > e.
It's intriguing to see that Hebrew has a phonetic stage which probably
reflects the end of the 3rd millennium, sometimes before Sumerian actually
became a dead language.
The attestation in Samuel I.9 sounds like one thousand years older.
I wonder how this can be explained.
Arnaud Fournet
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