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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Hebrew grammar, (was Zech 6:8)
  • Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 09:07:57 +1000

Peter Kirk wrote:

[snip]
There are all sorts of problems with your theory:

>Why then the preferred apocopation? As I said before, I can imagine,
>language being economic, people being lazy ;), that if a verbal form
>is getting heavier in the front due to the gemination, it might as
>well lose some weight at the back. In a yiqtol verb, presence or
>absence of an apocopated ending, or a short -a or -u short vowel in
>older phases of Hebrew would have given the yiqtol a certain meaning,
>but Hebrew lost its short end vowel anyway, and wayyqtl gets its
>meaning out of the gemination. The loose yiqtol is still available in
>the short jussive version and in the longer version.
>
>

If this kind of phonological process happened, it should have happened
consistently - a point which you yourself made concerning Arabic. In
fact apocopation simply cannot be analysed as phonological shortening
(for economy or from laziness), but it can very easily be explained
phonologically on the basis of the known existence in an earlier stage
of the language of separate yaqtul and yaqtulu verb forms. This point
can be demonstrated on the basis of regular and jussive YIQTOL forms
quite independently of WAYYIQTOL, which is formally identical to jussive
and cohortative with a prefixed WA- and gemination.

>...
>For those who want to suppose there was also a preterite yiqtol, I
>won't forbid that, but even if this had been the case in proto-Hebrew,
>proto-NWSemitic or proto-Semitic, it is not so relevant to the
>biblical stage of Hebrew that we find in our MT. Why not? If the
>(simple) past tense that Wayyqtl basically is, can be satisfactorily
>explained by means of the primary gemination, then "Ockham's razor"
>forbids us to *also* try to explain it by means of some proto-Hebrew
>preterite yiqtol, which is after all a reconstruction.
>
>

But Occam's Razor applies only if the simple explanation explains all
the phenomena. And the difference in forms between regular YIQTOL and
jussive cannot be explained in the way you have put forward, which (in
the absence of other convincing hypotheses) suggests to me that the
simplest hypothesis is that regular YIQTOL and jussive come from
different proto-NWSemitic verb forms, which are attested in cognate
languages. If this can be demonstrated independently of WAYYIQTOL, it
then becomes by far the simplest explanation of WAYYIQTOL that it is
(formally, rather than semantically) based on the jussive rather than
the regular YIQTOL.


[snip]

Herman: if you can get your hands on the following article, I would like you thoughts on it in relation to your theory. The discussion here recalled it to mind. It would seem to imply that wayyiqyol gemination is secondary.

Holmstedt, Robert D. "The Phonology of Classical Hebrew: A Linguistic Study of Long Vowels and Syllable Structure." Zeitschrift für Althebraistik 13 (2000): 145-156.

Regards,
David Kummerow.






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