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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Ugaritic; textbooks
  • Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:00:59 +1000


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






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