Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 01/12/2005 22:28, Herman Meester wrote:

> ...
>
> I like the idea that the innovation of C1-gemination has something to
> do with the disappearance of final short vowels. These things don't
> happen in a week time, they must have overlapped. Too bad Hebrew
> spelling is what it is, we can't see these short vowels, making all
> our thinking about the subject rather speculative per se.
>
>  
I don't think this version can possibly work. On your hypothesis 
C1-gemination is common to Hebrew and Arabic and so predates the split 
between these languages. But the disappearance of final short vowels in 
Hebrew postdates this split - in fact probably by many centuries - as 
classical Arabic still had final short vowels. So you can't make 
C1-gemination a general phenomenon depend on the disappearance of final 
short vowels. You could make the spread of this phenomenon from nouns to 
verbs so dependent, but that turns out to be more or less the same as my 
"adding the definite article to the start of yaqtul to distinguish it 
from yaqtul(u)".

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