Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Shai Heijmans" <shaih AT post.tau.ac.il>]

Rasmus,

First, let me see if I understand correctly.

Your first question is about the bgdkpt *with* dagesh: you accept that it
was
plosive, but you ask whether it was aspirated or not.
Your second question is about the bgdkpt *without* dagesh, and you want to
know its nature and its history.

Now for the answers, but I warn you that the evidence is scarce and feeble.

Question one: plosive /bgdkpt/ - aspirated or not?
========================================
We must rely here mainly on Greek. Greek had in 1000 BCE twofold
pronunciation of the plosives /kpt/: aspirated and non-aspirated. At that
time the Greeks borrowed the canaanite alphabet. Canaanite, posessing only
one pronunciation of bgdkpt (see below), had the letters kaf, peh and tav.
The Greeks chose these letters to represent their *unaspirated* plosives,
although they could have chosen them to represent their aspirated plosives.
The fact that they chose what they chose seems to show, that at 1000 BCE
Canaanite /ptk/ (and hence also /bgd/) was unaspirated rather than
aspirated.

But 1300 years later, when Origenes wrote the second colomn of his hexapla,
he used for every hebrew kpt (whether with dagesh or without) only the
aspirated greek letters ph, kh, th. In other words, if a non-aspirated
plosive
/k/ would exist in hebrew, Origenes would have transliterated it by kappa;
yet he trasliterated all hebrew kaf's (whether with dagesh or without it)
with the greek letter khi. From this you learn that Hebrew had lost
by then (300CE) the unaspirated plosives.

We see than that during the period between 1000 BCE and 300 CE the plosive
set has become aspirated.

Remark. It seems the upper border could be even lower than 300 CE, based on:
(1) the situation in the LXX; (2) Greek transcription of Syriac; (3) Syriac
transcription of Greek (three sorts of "pe"!); (4) ancient greek words like
"alpha" and "kithon". But all this evidence is problematic, and we can
discuss them off list if you want.

Bottom line: plosive bgdkpt were at first unaspirated, than aspirated.

Question two: history of the bgdkpt without dagesh.
===================================

I present here the model of E.Y.Kutscher, written in Leshonenu 29 (1965),
pp. 48-58. It is a somewhat improved model of the one presented by
Bergstrasser in his Hebraische Grammatik, paragraph 6i-m, and Z.S. Harris in
his Development of the Canaanite Dialects, pp. 66-67.

Kutscher presents a three-stages-shift as follows:

Base situation (protosemitic): only plosive, unaspirated bgdkpt.
shift no. 1: the plosive unaspirated bgdkpt turn *only after a vowel* to
plosive aspirated.
shift no. 2: the plosive aspirated bgdkpt turn into fricative
shift no. 3: the plosive unaspirated bgdkpt turn into plosive aspirated.

The base situation is the one presupposed by general protosemitic and
comperative studies.
Shift no. 3 is the discussion above (the answer to your first question).
Shifts no. 1 and 2 are required to explain a fricative pronuncation of the
bgdkpt without dagesh (they can also be seen as one shift, plosive aspir. >
fric., it doesn't really matter).

How do we know that those bgdkpt were fricative?
That is shown mainly by Syriac transcription of Greek. In those
transcriptions, there appears a special sign to represent the greek "pi"
(which was plosive and unaspirated). This was done, because neither syriac
"pe" nor syriac "fe" was suitable for greek "pi". And that leads to the
conclusion that the syrians heard three distinct sounds: plosive
non-aspirated (greek pi), plosive aspirated (syriac pe) and another one
(syriac "fe"), which can only be fricative. (See Noeldeke's Kurzgefasste
Syrische Grammatik, paragraph 15).

As for the time of the shift plosive>fricative:
It happened after the shifts ghaza>(azza and akh>aH, because we don't see BH
scribes confusing between gimel-ayin and between khaf-het.
This gh>( shift, that occured around 400 BCE according to Bergstrasser, 1000
BCE according to Harris, is the lower border of the sift plosive>fricative.

The *chronological* upper border is the shift of shwa medium > zero
(adhamathi > adhmathi = my land), but no one knows really when it occured.
As for the *absolute* upper border, it seems to be Arabic transcriptions of
Jewish place names (see Kampffmeyer, ZDPV 15) and the tiberian vocalistation
itself (both 700 CE). Although it sould be mentioned that Bergstasser claims
Origenes to be the upper border, i.e. 300 CE (paragraph 6m, see there his
explanation).

Bottom line:
In Tibarian hebrew, the twofold pronunciation was 1) plosive aspirated, and
2) fricative.
The shift plosive>fricative took place between 400 BCE to 300 CE according
to Bergstrasser, and 1000 CE to 700 CE according to Harris (Harris' view is
considered the better one where I come from).

One comment in the end: relatively new evidence shows that in Tiberian
hebrew (700 CE) there was a *threefold* pronunciation of the letter "tav"
(see I. Eldar, Hadayat al-Qari, Jerusalem 1994, pp. 76-77).

Any more questions? :)

Shai Heijmans