Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT usa.net>]

> From: decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca (Vincent DeCaen)

> in the second term i'm supposed to teach intermediate students
> something about epigraphic hebrew.  traditional descriptions of the
> putative nature of the Jerusalem dialect 700-600 insist that
> diphthongs had not yet been monophthongized.  no schwas either.
> hmmmm.  crucial question.  re: *ai to [e:] all *ai are still [ay]
> and not yet [e:].  fine.  but the final weak verbs end in *ai, and
> are not and never have been spelled with a yod, but a heh.  must
> that not mean that *ai > e: had already happened before the
> orthography was borrowed in the first place? "he will be" is YHYH
> isn't it? and not YHYY?  it seems to me that descriptions look too
> much like Arabic to be a coincidence.

Probably [ay] went to [e:] fairly early in the cases where it did
monophthongize -- but in Judean Hebrew at least, there were a number of
environments (mainly in the stressed closed syllables of words not in
the "construct" state, or when the [y] is part of a geminated [y])
where [ay] did not monophthongize.  (In some of the other languages it
appears that diphthongal [ay] went to [e:] in pretty much all
environments.)  The [ay] which did not monophthongize basically
remains unmonophthongized all the way down into Tiberian (though with
a vowel frequently epenthesized after the [y] in segholate nouns,
which means that the [ay] sequence is no longer diphthongal).  As for
lamedh-he forms, in many cases [y] probably actually originally
disappeared between a preceding vowel and a following verb mood vowel
(before the change of word-final vowel loss occurred; resulting in new
contracted vowels which don't necessarily behave exactly the same as
original long vowels, original short vowels, or original diphthongs in
their subsequent historical evolution) -- so that monophthongization
isn't really directly relevant as a historical sound change.

If you're assuming that whenever you see a letter _yod_ or _waw_ in an
early inscription which does not represent a prevocalic or geminate
consonant, then there absolutely must have been an actual diphthong
there at the time that that the Phoenician alphabet was first adapted
to Hebrew spelling, or when Hebrew epigraphic spelling conventions
became fixed, I'm not sure that this conclusion necessarily holds (I
would have to look though some of the literature again, such as Harris
1939, Garr 1985, etc. -- but I'm not sure the available evidence
forces a single interpretation).

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT usa.net   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/