Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Herman,

If you have access, have a look at pages 300-304 of the following essay:

Miller, Cynthia L. "Methodological Issues in Reconstructing Language
Systems from Epigraphic Fragments." Pages 281-305 in The Future of
Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions. Edited
by James K. Hoffmeier and Alan Millard. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.

Miller gives a short overview on the positions of Tropper (both grammar 
and 2001 JSS article) and Testen (I mentioned this monograph to you a 
while ago) regarding the emergence of the definite article.

Problematically for you, Tropper raises the following data regarding 
/hn/: a) anaphorically preceeding a noun (RS 1.1002 =KTU 1.40); b) 
preceeding a noun preceeding a demonstrative (RS 16.402:31-32 =KTU 2.33; 
RS 96.2039); and c) prefixed to the following word with /n/ assimilated 
(RS 29.093:16 =KTU 2.70).

Hoping this helps,

David Kummerow.

> Frankly, Karl, I didn't think I had to learn Ugaritic until I wanted
> to convince my professor Gzella here in Leiden, of the gemination
> theory for the definite article in Arabic and Hebrew. I can imagine
> this won't interest everyone, b.t.w. However, this theory belongs to
> Galia Hatav's, and my, theory on the "wayyiqtol" form and the article.
> All I have to do now, in fact, is to show Gzella that his reference to
> the Ugaritic word /hn/ (which I think is in this case not relevant to
> BHebrew) doesn't make sense. For example, the article always preceeds
> the noun, and I want to take a look at this /hn/, suspecting it
> follows nouns, and not preceeds them.
> So I don't think I need Ugaritic to understand Hebrew better, I think
> we need Hebrew to understand Ugaritic better! The reason being that we
> simply know a lot more of Hebrew: we have a lot of vowels etc. of it,
> not of Ugaritic.
> שלום, Herman