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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?

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  • From: Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
  • Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 20:32:10 -0400

Uri Hurwitz wrote:
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.

Precisely. I meant "advanced" in the same way that one might describe a person as being of "advanced age." I don't personally try to say much about one language being more advanced than another in anything like a qualitative sense. It was a purely sequential remark--that extant Hebrew and Aramaic show a further degree of change from whatever we might infer about an original "proto-Semitic" state. If this is true of morphology, then it seems less plausible that their phonology was more primitive than anything else we know.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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