Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>]

> From: "S. L." <lyosovs AT cityline.ru>
> Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 01:26:31 +0300
> Subject: Re: Tiberian Final Shwa

> The only thing I have not understood in the first reading of your
> posting is why they spelled wayyak with shwa, since no 2fs suffix
> was involved.

The requirement that word-final _kaph_ without a vowel diacritic have
a _sh@wa_ diacritic (if it was not to be interpreted as being silent)
was probably imposed in order to reinforce the orthographic contrast
between 2nd.fem.sg. and 2nd.masc.sing. endings (i.e. to transform the
orthographic contrast between the two endings from a "privative
opposition" to an "equipollent oppposition", to use technical
terminology), but this requirement was imposed uniformly on all
word-final _kaph_ (whether part of a 2nd.fem.sg. ending or not).


> `at(t) < `atti, it is true, but wayyak < *wayyakki or something like
> it (cf.. arab. juss. yabni, akkad. praet. ibni, etc.). My problem
> was: Why the degemination did not work in all final positions, or at
> least (if we disregard wayyet.) in all final geminated bgdpkt? Does
> it have to do with relative chronology? (I would be inclined to
> think that the loss of post-stress short vowel in *`atti - cf.Ez
> 36:13 - is later than in wayyak, but then it is probably still
> `att).

The synchronic status within Tiberian Hebrew is that both short
2nd.fem.sg forms and short lamedh-he forms can be considered to be
derived by a sychronic truncation rule or process, but 2nd.fem.sg
truncation is a more "shallow" process (i.e. occurring later in the
derivation, if you adopt a sequential model of synchronic phonological
derivations), so that the two synchonic truncation processes have
different relationships with synchronic processes of epenthesis and
spirantization (see chapter 1 of my dissertation for details).

The diachronic developments are rather complex; there never was a
true regular historical sound change which truncated word-final long
vowels, but there was a sound change around the end of the 2nd.
millennium B.C. which regularly deleted all word-final short vowels.

The Tiberian forms _yakke_ and _wayyakh_ go back to forms something
like imperfect *_yankiyu_ and preterite *_waCyankiy_ (where "C" is an
unknown consonant that was later assimilated); by the time the late
2nd. millennium B.C. word-final short vowel deletion change occurred,
the word-final _y_ of the preterite had already been deleted, so that
the preceding _i_ vowel was word-final and was subject to the regular
word-final short-vowel deletion process.  Later, the preterite /
consecutive imperfect was re-interpreted within the synchronic grammar
as being derived from the ordinary imperfect, and this created a
special morphologized lamedh-he truncation process within the
sychronic grammar (see chapter 4 of my dissertation for some
discussion).

As for 2nd.fem.sg. forms, in the second millennium B.C. (before
word-final short-vowel deletion) some suffixes ending in a vowel were
"anceps" when the suffix occurred word-finally (i.e. the vowel of the
suffix, when word-final, had both long and short variants).  The
second fem.sg. suffix usually had the form -tii with long vowel, but
also had a short-vowel variant -ti when occurring word-finally (the
short-vowel variant -ti did not occur when the 2nd.fem.sg. suffix was
followed by other suffixes within the word, since the "anceps"
variations did not apply to word-internal vowels).  When word-final
short-vowel deletion occurred, around the end of the second millennium
B.C., it regularly deleted the vowel of short-vowel variants of
word-final suffixes, but left long-vowel variants in place unaltered.

Usually, the resulting variations between no vowel and a long vowel
were levelled in favor of one variant of the suffix: so in the case of
the 2nd.masc.sg. possessive and preposition object suffix -ka(a)
(which would have had the two variant forms -k and -kaa after
word-final short-vowel deletion), there was standardization in favor
of the -kaa variant with long vowel (with the vowelless -k variant
only showing up in certain prepositional forms), whereas in the case
of the 2nd.fem.sg. possessive and preposition object suffix -ki(i)
(which would have had the two variant forms -k and -kii after
word-final short-vowel deletion), there was standardization in favor
of the no-vowel -k variant (with -kii only surviving in a few sporadic
cases, mainly in certain Psalms filled with "foreign"-looking forms,
if I remember correctly).  In the case of the 2nd.fem.sg. verb object
suffix, this morpheme had the form -ti(i) when occurring word finally
(i.e. both long and short-vowel variants), but had only the form -tii
(with long vowel) when another suffix followed it within the word
(since "anceps" variations only occurred word-finally).  After
word-final short-vowel loss, this suffix had the variant forms -t and
-tii word-finally, but only the form -tii word-internally -- and what
happened was that there was standardization in favor of the vowelless
-t variant word-finally, but that the only-occurring form -tii (with
long vowel) remained in use word-internally.

This alternation between word-internal -tii and word-final -t was
later re-interpreted in the synchronic grammar as being due to a
synchronic morphologized truncation rule (just as the lamedh-he
alternation between long imperfect and short consecutive imperfect had
been).  You can see that these are synchronic truncation rules because
of the word-final clusters they produce in forms such as _katabt_,
_wayyashq_, etc. -- by contrast, basic (i.e. underived or
"underlying") word-final consonant clusters are almost always broken
up (by segholate epenthesis etc.).

So there are these two sychronic truncation processes (both of which
are ultimately due to lingering side-effects left behind by the
historical sound-change rule of word-final short-vowel loss, but
neither of which much resembles this diachronic change, or is any kind
of historically-accurate recapitulation).  I don't know if the
reinterpretation of the 2nd.sg.fem. alternations as due to a
synchronic truncation process was historically subsequent to the
reinterpretation of the lamedh-he alternations, but for whataver
reason, and through whatever historical path, in Tiberian Hebrew the
2nd.sg.fem. truncation process is synchronically "shallower" than
lamedh-he truncation (i.e. ordered later in the phonological
derivations of the synchronic grammar).  In generative historical
grammar, a synchronically earlier-applying process does not
necessarily have to have a historically earlier origin than a
synchronically later-applying process (the synchronic-diachronic
correspondences can be inverted by "rule reordering" etc.)


> I have not read the Chomsky article.  Does it imply that
> synchronically (for the inventors of the nequdot) some shwa's were
> more equal than others?

Chomsky doesn't try to penetrate to the earliest historical beginnings
of Hebrew pointing (which are unlikely to have resembled the developed
Tiberian system in any case), but he assumes that in the system as we
have it there is a difference between vocal and silent _sh@wa_'s.


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