Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>]

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