Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

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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