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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Origins of the definite article of BHebrew

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Herman Meester <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Origins of the definite article of BHebrew
  • Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:53:24 +0000

On 14/12/2005 06:06, Herman Meester wrote:

Hello everyone,
For those interested, below I quote a discussion, only lengthy at
first sight, it's not so bad, on the origin of the articel in
Central/NW Semitic. It is intended for those who are still in doubt, a
condition I would be happy relieve you of ;) Especially the end is
IMHO rather good argument that I hadn't thought of before. My opponent
knows a lot of comparative Sem. linguistics, maybe too much to be good
for him ;) but this is not always the best strategy.
...

Is the following your "rather good argument"? I think your opponent knows better than you here, in most ways.


Herman:
You are right: the question is, what is more natural in the case of
the "article", assimilation or dissimilation? Then you call the
examples kk > lk and jj > lj "unprecedented".

That's interesting. because in Egyptian Arabic we have: ikkursi "the
chair" or iggawaami`, "the mosques". Is Egyptian an example of even
further assimilation, or an example of (more conservative) original
gemination that did not dissimilate yet? I think the latter is the
case.


Yes, but do you have any evidence? It really does seem improbable that modern Egyptian Arabic is more conservative in such ways than ancient classical Arabic, as Arabic was brought into Egypt by speakers of something like classical Arabic.

Obviously, the way the Arabic article is written (alif laam) doesn't
mean anything, as I hope you agree. ...


No, I don't agree. If anything in Arabic is conservative, it is the spelling in the Qur'an, which for most Arabs is the very words of God. The Qur'anic spelling of the article, always with lam, surely indicates very early writers' intuition about the form of the article, even if it was not how they actually pronounced it.

... If we have, in a number of
consonants, dissimilation to (a)lC, the spelling may well be based on
the dissimilation, not on the original gemination. ...


If so, the dissimilation must have taken place in Arabia before the Qur'an was written, but somehow the Arabs who moved from Arabia to Egypt after the Qur'an was written avoided this dissimilation, and have preserved this idiosyncrasy for 1400 years.

... In my own language,
Dutch, we write quite a lot of things that have nothing to do with
original phonetics.

If we then look purely at phonology, we find that, when we follow your
point of view, the original Arabic article is not 'al, but l. After
all, there may often be the short -a- vowel preceding -l-/the
gemination, but this -a- is always overruled by any preceding short
vowel in an open, ending syllable. The alif is always alifu l-wasl,
meaning that it is no consonant at all, it's just a letter signifying
the absence of any consonant, easy for spelling.


Fair enough. The theory that the Arabic article is simply l-, and the preceding a- is simply to ease pronunciation, does seem reasonably promising. However, you need to expalin why the added vowel is a- here, but i- in ibn etc, and for this reason it seems more likely to me that the original article was al-, or perhaps hal-, with the a- or ha- eliding after a word ending in a vowel - an extremely common phenomenon cross-linguistically.

I don't think we can argue with that; it is hardly possible that the
alif of the "article" al- has quiesced, having once been a real
glottal stop, because Arabic has kept a lot, or most, of its original
glottal stops. I guess شمال shimaal vs. شمأل sham'al (found this word
in "Qifaa nabki" of Imru'u l-Qays) may be an exception I can think of,
where hamz has disappeared, but this may be also the force of
three-consonantal root building, or it may be that the poet, for
reasons of rhythm, couldn't use a long vowel there.


Are you talking about the word for "north" or "north wind" here? There certainly seems to be an alef in the original form of this word, cf. Hebrew שְׂמֹאל sem'ol "left, north". BDB, yes, the Hebrew dictionary in its entry for this word, gives various Arabic forms: شِمَالٔ, شَمَالٔ, شَأمَلٔ, شَامَلٔ for the Arabic word meaning "north wind", and in all of these the original root alef seems to have disappeared, or been reduced to a mere long vowel indicator. The Persian form of the word seems to be شَمال "north" and شِمال "left", in which the alef is again a long vowel indicator. So the loss of the glottal stop is not just a matter for one poet.

Another similar case is Arabic and Persian ملك malak "angel", which is surely cognate with Hebrew מַלְאָך mal'ak "messenger, angel", but the alef seems to have been lost in Arabic in the singular, although preserved in the plural form ملائك, ملائكه mala'ik(a) (not sure I have written these correctly).

So we have the undeniable fact that in your conviction, only the
consonant -l- is the article in Arabic, not *'al. Where, then, is the
link with -han-, -ham-, or -hal- or whatever in other Semitic or other
than standard Arabic languages? If we present it in writing, we can
make people believe that *'al has something to do with *hal, *han, and
the like, but once we present the phonological facts, i.e. the Arabic
"article" is -l-, and the Hebrew sister "article" is -ha(n/l/m?), it
doesn't fit anymore: the parallel is too far-fetched.


This, it seems to me, fits rather well. If in proto-NW Semitic or something the article was l-, it would have attracted a vowel before it which was perhaps a-, which in certain dialects became aspirated to ha- (a process which you call "not surprising"); but this is not found after a vowel in a prefix or (in Arabic) in a preceding word. There is nothing here which gives more support to gemination than to the original article being l-. And it still seems more probable to me that the article was al- rather than simply l-.

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





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