Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jan-Wim Wesselius" <jww AT xs4all.nl>]

Dear Liz,
I am glad you did not ask about e/ay: that situation is much more complex!
With o/aw the situation is pretty straightforward (if you allow for some
small simplifications...). I do not have Porten-Muraoka on my desk, nor any
other grammar, but I'll try to explain anyway. For the moment we will not
discuss those cases where o clearly derives from original (short) u
(hashokha, "darkness", qetol, "kill!", etc. in Biblical Aramaic).
There are certain nominal and verbal patterns where you see aw and o
interchanging (or only o) in later Aramaic dialects such as Biblical
Aramaic, Onkelos Aramaic and Syriac, mainly (a) nouns from ayin-waw roots
(mot-/mawt-, "death", tor-/tawr-, "ox" (Hebr. shor); (b) verbal forms of
lamed-waw roots (gelo-/gelaw-, yiglawn-/yiglon-, of gela, "to reveal"); (c)
hafel of pe-waw roots (hoda'/hawda', "he informed", hotiv-/hawtiv-, "he
caused to dwell"). It is a reasonable assumption that the consonant waw is
original in all these cases. In most types of earlier Aramaic (before Ezra
and Daniel) you find a waw written in nearly all cases.
But, but, but... (1) we also find this waw in cases where there probably
never was a spoken waw (e.g. the geogr. name gwzn, Bibl. Hebrew gozan,
Akkadian guzana); (2) in texts which release traditional orthography, such
as the so-called Hermopolis letters, or for that matter Ezra and Daniel (see
my article in SJOT 13/1 for the relation between the two and their date of
composition), and occasionally in other texts, you find defective spellings
even where the waw is clearly a root consonant.
The only linguistic situation which appears by-and-large capable of
explaining this bewildering situation is that in ye old times /aw/ and /o/
were variants, perhaps with different distributions in different times and
places, while traditional orthography usually was with waw. There is more to
it, but this should convey the main issues. I hope this helps and that I did
not forget anything important, Jan-Wim

Jan-Wim Wesselius, Hoekenes 26A, 1068 MT Amsterdam
Tel. 020 - 619 1535; fax 020 - 619 1636; e-mail jww AT xs4all.nl

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Liz Fried <lizfried AT umich.edu>
Aan: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Datum: vrijdag 3 maart 2000 21:17
Onderwerp: aw-->o?


>Muraoka and Porten in discussing the grammar of the Elephantine
>papyri say that the /aw/ dipthong in words is usually spelled out
>plene with a waw.
>
>How do you tell whether an o is from an /aw/ dipthong?
>Are all o's from /aw/ dipthongs?
>What else are o's from?
>
>thanks,
>Liz
>
>Lisbeth S. Fried
>Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
>New York University
>51 Washington Sq. S.
>New York, NY 10012
>
>
>
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