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b-hebrew - Re: Re: [b-hebrew] etymolo

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
  • To: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Re: [b-hebrew] etymolo
  • Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 16:47:09 -0500

Uri:

My objection to "proto-semitic" is not that such a language may have existed,
but the specific form postulated for it. In particular, I think that the
concept that all the phonemes ever expressed in a semitic language had to
have been in proto-semitic (I may have overstated this). As I understand it,
the theory is that languages only lose phonemes, and don't gain them.

But this stands in direct contradiction to the documented history of some
languages. An example I gave before was that in Viking times, Scandinavians
recognized only 16 phonemes in their language. Today Norwegian recognizes
around twice as many. Contact with other languages and loan words brought in
phonemes. The same thing happened to English after the Norman conquest. Going
back to Hebrew, there is no reason to assume that just because a cognate
language has more phonemes than Hebrew means that Hebrew lost phonemes. Why
not recognize that the cognate languages gained phonemes?

Does that mean that Hebrew never changed? I specifically claim that Hebrew
changed greatly after the Babylonian Captivity, and that was because of the
influence first of Aramaic, then Greek. Some phonemes were split into two or
more phonemes. At least one was lost. Before the Captivity, Hebrew was
largely in linguistic isolation, which tends to slow change, even almost to
stop it: most of the changes I noticed so far are stylistic in nature, not
linguistic.

Further, the retention or loss of specific features of a language is
unpredictable. For example, English, which has changed greatly over the
centuries, retained the theta phoneme, while German lost it even though in
other ways it has changed far less. The same uneven retention, acquisition
and loss of linguistic features should be expected to be found also in the
semitic languages. Hence your examples below.

One question that neither of us can answer is how much change in Hebrew was
there before Moses? While there are indications that Moses was working with
written documents when he compiled Genesis, how much editing did he do to
update the language? Any?

In closing, I think that we know less about B-Hebrew than what we want to
admit to. Even if we assume an early date for Moses, Hebrew as a national
language living largely in linguistic isolation lasted less than a thousand
years. Because it was in isolation, we find almost no transliterations of
Hebrew words or names into other languages. We find a few loan words, but not
many. We need to find ourselves a native speaker! Or rather several, for
different periods.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Uri Hurwitz" <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>
>
> Karl Randolph <kwrandolph AT email.com> wrote, in part:
> "...The Arabic is a different language from a millenium later.
> Proto-Semitic is merely postulated based on presuppositions I
> believe are in error,...."
>
> Now let us take just two examples from Biblical Hebrew:
>
> 1. F. S. nouns in construct , e.g. Dodah -- Dodat-YYY;
> same F. noun in declension, e.g. Dodati, Dodatkha etc. . The
> question is where did the "T" come from?
>
> The final "T'" which was a marker of the F.S., was lost in BH
> in the regular form and returned only in the construct and
> declension. This happenes to be preserved in classical Arabic, but
> lost in many other Semitic languages, including also, by the way,
> in colloquial Arabic.
>
> 2. Another noun : "Bat" , plural "Banot" . The questiom
> is where did the "N" come from? And, to contintue with the same
> noun, if one looks at the declension in the MT, "Bitti" "Bittkha"
> etc. why is there Dagesh forte, for emphasis, in pronounciation,
> in the "T".
>
> The "N" was part of the regular noun *Bnt-- compare with
> the Arabic "Bint"--, but dropped off in BH. However it returned in
> the BH plural, as well as in the declensions, where the emphasis
> in the pronounciation compensated for the lost and assimilated
> missing letter.
>
> All Semitic langauges share many features. It was therefore
> clear that they are all connected , and go back to a common
> original language, or proto-Semitic.
>
> ..."Now I know that you disagree with much of what I claim."...
> [Karl]
>
> It so happenes, Karl, that I appreciate and respect your
> method. It also happened that I agreed with some of your opinions
> and stated so publicly on this list. But not with all of them.
>
> Uri
>
>
>
> From: "Uri Hurwitz"
>
> > Of course; I avoided mentioning the other root, beginning with
> > 'Ayin, to prevent confusion, especially since it is totally
> > separate in lexical meaning from that of ' Almah, which started
> > this discussion.
> >
> > Uri
> >
> >
--
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