Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

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

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Vadim Cherny <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
  • Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 11:48:17 +0100

On 04/05/2005 08:28, Vadim Cherny wrote:

...


Well, by "I don't think" I just trid to state politely that such examples
must be non-existent. If you refer to them - pre-2000 BCE - then name some.


The basement of the British Museum is full of them. Seriously, there is a huge quantity of surviving cuneiform tablets. Exactly how many of them are Akkadian and before 2000 BC I don't know, but the number is significant. There is a much larger number of surviving tablets from the Old Babylonian period, 2000-1600 BC, which was certainly before the western Semitic alphabet was in widespread use. See http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/ for some more details. This includes the following:

Old Akkadian. Akkadian is first attested in proper names in Sumerian texts (ca. 2800 BC). From ca. 2500 BC one finds texts fully written in Akkadian. The language attested in documents of the third millenium is called Old Akkadian. It is the language spoken in the central parts of Mesopotamia (the city Akkad is near present day Bagdad). The number of tablets in Old Akkadian is not very large.

...

...

It is universally accepted.


No, it is not. This is what I learned, at the very least.
It is simply a question, whether Aramaic affix aleph predated Hebrew hey. To
anyone not prejudiced with your view of the history of language, it is
obvious that aleph is a late pronunciation of vowelized hey.
Even while rare late cases of clear feminine gender of animate objects might
indeed by influenced by Greek -a, other cases, not related to gender, likely
employ affix hey in its vague meaning of direction. At any rate, -a in malka
has different semantics from -h in milhamah.


The final -a in Hebrew (and Aramaic) feminine nouns (which is derived from an original -at which survives in the construct form) is a common feature of Semitic languages, so old that it is shared with Egyptian which has -t as the feminine marker. Arabic has a very similar alternation between -a and -at. It is certainly not influenced by Greek -a. It is clearly an indication of femininity in words like malka as well as in feminine adjectival endings. In other words it simply marks feminine grammatical gender. The common origin of this ending is shown in the way that it changes to -at in the construct state.

The Aramaic definite suffix alef is a quite different object. Note that the definite state of Aramaic feminine nouns ends in tav-alef, i.e. -at plus the definite suffix, with the -t reappearing before the vowel.

The directional he suffix is also something quite different.

Also different is the 3rd person feminine possessive suffix -ah, which has a pronounced he marked with mappiq.

...

Would you agree with these points:

- at some time, speechless humans received or developed a primitive

language

Yes. But this process may have started before our ancestors were fully
human. It certainly happened many tens of thousands of years ago, so is
of little relevance to Hebrew.


I'm not a specialist in the field, but I recall publication some years ago
of unearthing in Jericho the remains of the oldest human with some specific
anatomical feature, necessary for speech. Articulate speech did not start
long ago.


I would be interested in more details of this one. But most scholars seem to hold that humans have been anatomically modern and so capable of speech for more than 100,000 years. On your theory there is also a serious issue of how Native Americans and Australian aboriginals are able to speak, for it is known that their ancestors were almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world since before the time of Jericho.

...

- Hebrew developed, ...
... accumulating grammatical forms

No. Hebrew demonstrably developed from an earlier language which seems
to have had more grammatical forms. Hebrew may have added a few new ones
of its own, but also dropped many of those of the earlier language.


That's an issue of terms. Say, predecessor language of Hebrew developed from
a single grammatical form to diversified grammar.


OK, I will accept that "human language developed, accumulating grammatical forms".

- earlier stages of development of proto-Hebrew included progressively

less

grammatical forms

No.


How so? A developed language includes many forms, the earliest language -
one only. So as we go back in time, less forms are there.


Again a matter of terminology. Earlier stages of development of human language included progressively less grammatical forms, true, but these earlier stages cannot be described as proto-Hebrew any more than proto-English.

...

You are right, I simplified the matter. Let's replace "davar nouns" with
"c'c' and c'c'c' nouns." Would you agree that proto-Hebrew at some time
consisted only of such nouns? This seems fairly obvious. This was a
single-vowel language.

No, I would not agree. This seems to me fairly obviously false.


What false? That a proto-language had only nouns? ...


Possible if we are talking about proto-human rather than proto-Hebrew, but entirely speculative.

... That these nouns, like
davar, had a single vowel? That proto-language, consequently, had a single
vowel?


For proto-human, not obviously false, simply improbable and baseless speculation.

You keep avoiding the major point, that all Hebrew vowels developed just as
expected from the syntactical accent elongation and stress-shift shortening.


No, I don't ignore it, I have repeatedly rejected it and denied it. I have provided some evidence to refute it, but if you wish to put forward such an apparently crazy theory you will only be taken seriously if you can provide some good positive evidence in favour of it. Simply repeating it without evidence will just annoy people and lead to you being written off as a crank. In fact most of this list has probably done so long ago.

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



--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.11.3 - Release Date: 03/05/2005





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page