Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

 It is true of course that OA had the case endings which were gradually lost. 
But I don't understand why languages that lost them are in "a more advanced 
stage" as you put it.
 
Arabic maintains them to this day, though they are dropped in the the 
colloquial. From this point of view English would be"more advanced" than 
German.
 
The traces of case ending preserved in BH such as Chayto Aretz do demonstrate 
an earlier stage of the language, and thus diachronic development, a subject 
that came up in another thread.
 
 Uri

Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net> wrote, in part:
-----
..... For that matter, the morphology of West Semitic
languages like Hebrew and Aramaic from their earliest
writing in West Semitic script shows a more advanced stage
than extant Akkadian, in that they had already lost case
endings (for instance). So far from being more primitive,
they had actually already progressed to a later stage of
development.....




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On 27/04/2005 15:20, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> ...
>
>Agreed. But my point is that the ubiquity of cuneiform and
>Akkadian before this point shows that this writing system
>was not vowelless simply because of a primitive state for
>Semitic languages. In fact, cuneiform had already been used
>to write Semitic languages for centuries, which shows
>clearly that there were vowel distinctions in Akkadian and
>in the West Semitic languages recorded in some cuneiform
>texts. For that matter, the morphology of West Semitic
>languages like Hebrew and Aramaic from their earliest
>writing in West Semitic script shows a more advanced stage
>than extant Akkadian, in that they had already lost case
>endings (for instance). So far from being more primitive,
>they had actually already progressed to a later stage of
>development.
>  
>

Agreed. Although I see cuneiform as being rarely used for west Semitic, 
it certainly was used sometimes, and from this the vowels can be 
determined, and Vadim's speculation about vowelless languages can be 
laid to rest.

>  
>
>>This system later became  the standard in the
>>Persian empire, with slightly different glyph  shapes, and
>>is the origin of the modern Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and 
>>Thaana writing systems - and less directly of European,
>>Indian and SE  Asian writing systems. This is surely what
>>Vadim was writing about.
>>    
>>
>
>I know that's what he was writing about, but by ignoring the
>cuneiform evidence, he reached a faulty conclusion.
>Stressing the cuneiform evidence from throughout the ANE,
>which predates texts in West Semitic script, is a useful
>corrective to this problem.
>  
>

Thanks for making this clear point!

>> ...
>
>
>I meant phonetic vowels. My point is that there is no stage
>of attested writing that we can say convincingly predates
>the existence of vowels in spoken language. ...
>

Of course! Vowels have probably existed in spoken language for at least 
50,000 years, indeed for as long as there has been spoken human language.


-- 
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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