Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/11/06, Peter Kirk wrote:

> I must say this sounds unlikely. More probable is some confusion,
> because people write -ah on the basis that written final h is normally
> silent in Hebrew, Arabic and English. This tends to obscure the cases,
> rare in all these languages, where the final h should be pronounced. As
> I see it, an actual phonetic shift t > h > 0 in both languages is much
> less likely than a direct shift t > 0, with the h being written purely
> as a mater lectionis. The dual shift theory makes it hard to explain why
> final h was not lost in a few words like Allah/Eloah and others with
> mappiq in Hebrew. Anyway, as I mentioned before, the Arabic orthography
> in such matters is probably rather late, later than times when we more
> or less know that Hebrew final h was not usually pronounced.

He is writing in Hebrew and there is no confusion.  He quotes Bergstrasser,
Hebraische Grammatik, amongst various points: "the final annihiliation of the
h of the feminine ending -ah."  Then he says at the end after mentioning
various other points, "things of this sort are mentioned by various other
linguists such as ..."  This Grammar he quotes, is from the early 20th
century -- pretty old.  To see what the current opinion is, the place to look
is in various recent discussion of Semitic studies.  I don't think I'll be 
able
to do that soon, though.  You suggest that it makes it hard to explain why
the h was not lost )eloah.  Well, the "ah" in )eloah is a furtive patah, and
developed relatively late.  Supposedly, the word was pronounced for a long
time as ")eloh" or ")iloh".  The -o- represents the development of long a > o
in Canaanite.  Now, the final -a in feminine words was a short a.  So either
we suppose that -h was used to spell final short -a's or we suppose that
somehow final short -a's lengthened.  This makes it hard to explain the
second person pronoun -ta, also probably originally short.  It also requires
us to assume a certain position on the issue of case endings -- that they
were lost -- because then we have more short -a's to deal with.

At Siloam we have various feminine words - hnqbh, )mh, zdh -- but the verb
hyt, apparently "hayta."  Why is there no -h for hyt, but there is for the
following word zdh?

> > All the forms of final -h being a m.l. can be traced, then, to
> > some consonantal -h with varying degrees of confidence:
> > 1) -h for -o in 3rd person masculine, originally -ahu
> > 2) -h for -a in feminine words, originally -ah
> > 3) -h for -e in final -h verbs (bnh, etc), where the h, being
> > part of the verbal root suggests it would have been
> > originally consonantal.
> > I guess both #2 and #3 are controversial, though.

> Certainly! For #2 see above. #3 is almost certainly wrong, for these
> "lamed-he" verbs have cognates in Arabic etc with a final Y or W vowel,
> and there are traces of this Y or W in some forms in Hebrew. It seems
> clear that the final he is simply a marker of a final vowel.

Take the Balaam Inscription.  This inscription uses -h for final feminine
markers -- (lmh, mlkh, )nph, (nyh, khnh -- it has "mh" for "what?" but has
"lm" for "why?" and "$)ltk" for "asked of you."  Various final -h verbs are
denoted with h -- $hh, ybkh, )th.  At Siloam, we have "hyh" as a final -h
verb.  The original consonant in this verbs was probably -y, and in those
cases it shifted sometimes to -w.  Perhaps in other cases it shifted to -h.
The assumption that -y and -w are traces and -h is not is not clear to me
at all.  On the other hand, we have in Siloam "wzh" (and this) which
suggests a use for -h as final -e, if we assume that the -h is not some
development due to what seems to me a probable original glottal stop
in this pronoun, which was preserved in the feminine.

> And there are other cases of final silent he in biblical Hebrew which
> are not covered above, e.g. names like Shilo(h) and Shlomo(h), the
> directional he suffix, nouns like LAYLA(h) which are masculine and have
> an unstressed he ending, masculine names ending in -ya(h) contracted
> from -yahu, particles like ZE(h) and MA(h), etc etc. You would find it
> hard to claim that all of these were originally pronounced "h". And you
> still have to answer the point of why 99% of final h sounds were lost
> but 1% survived.

The directional he suffix is present in Ugaritic, which suggests it was
originally with consonantal force.  In any case, you need to use
inscriptional evidence.  Furthermore, the above are inconsistent as
regards patah vs qamatz, generally taken to reflect a difference in
length.  Thus layla(h) has a qamatz, but ma(h) has a patah, as does
)eloa(h).

> > The -h spelling for 3rd person possessive letter is
> > attested in various places, including Arad, Lachish,
> > Mesad Hashavyahu, and near Jerusalem.  It is hard
> > therefore to see this as a dialectical variation or different
> > spelling convention and more reasonable to see the -w
> > as an alternative spelling convention that began to
> > replace the -h in the late 7th or 6th century.
>
> Agreed, if we can agree that this is an alternative spelling convention
> which does not necessarily reflect a change of pronunciation.

You may want to argue it is not an immediate change of
pronunciation but a change that had taken long before.  But
given that there was originally an h in the pronoun, and that
-w- came to signify -o- through consonantal -aw- -> -o- it is
hard to say that the change was not due to pronunciation
at all.

> OK. But it is by no means proven that the -h in pre-exilic spelling ever
> represented -ahu rather than being a mater lectionis for -o. We need to
> look elsewhere for evidence of the date of the change from -ahu to -o,
> and to confirm that this actually did take place.

Well, can you explain then why they would use a -h for -o?
The suggestion that -h was an historical spelling that originally
represented a consonant, which, after having developed into
-o, meant that -h was taken to mean a m.l. for -o makes sense.
The idea that they would use a -h for -o out of the blue does
not.  Especially since -aw- is closer to the -o- sound and if
someone had to pick a letter out of the blue when the script
is consonantal, they'd probably use -w and not -h.

> > So all
> > we may be able to say is that the h in the 3rd person
> > possessive was dropped sometime during the First
> > Temple period, but before the 6th century.

> No, I don't think we can say this, as we have no evidence that the
> change didn't take place much earlier - even if we accept that it did
> take place at some time, which is presumably evidenced by
> reconstructions early Semitic from a range of languages.

The idea that it occurred during the 1st Millenium BCE is
based on the concept that prior documents were written in
purely consonantal script with no m.l.  The earliest document
with m.l. is from 9th century Tell Fekherye.  This would mean
that at the start of the 10th century, the script having been
purely consonantal, a final -h represented an -h- sound. If
it were -o, it would not have been written, as many scholars
propose for Gezer.  The development of -h to -o through the
loss of -h probably happened during the 1st Millenium BCE.

> Agreed, it is not proven. But it is also not disproved. In fact the
> survival of such spellings as Shilo(h) and Shlomo(h) for people and
> places prominent in the first temple period (but not later) strongly
> suggests to me that this was a first temple period spelling convention.

You have no evidence of Shilo(h) and Shlomo(h) from pre-exilic
inscriptions.  Given your statement that they are "prominent in the
first Temple period," you'd have to actually explain why prominent
names are not attested in pre-exilic inscriptions.

> But rather than try to prove this point, I will remind you that your
> conclusion "the -h to -w spelling convention does show this change of
> pronunciation" is entirely dependent on this use being disproved, and it
> has not been disproved. So I reject your conclusion, as mere speculation
> in the absence of this disproof.

I don't have to explain something which I say suggest is not true and that
is also lacking in evidence.  You do.  So long as $lmh and $lh are not
attested in pre-exilic inscriptions, I'm fine.  I don't have to
disprove that in
some obscure cave there is an inscription that has the spelling "$lmh."
But let me give you something to think about.  Both the names Shlomo
and Shilo are attested in particular instances with a final -n -- Solomon,
and Shilonite.  It's possible that the original spelling and pronounciation
was with a final -n, which dropped.  This may suggest that -h
represented an -o for some period in time, but this could have been only
during 6th century BCE or perhaps the 7th century BCE.  In any case,
without any evidence of the actual spelling of these words in
pre-exilic times, there's nothing to talk about.

> Well, let me restate this as being how most scholars reconstruct the
> pronunciation of ancient Hebrew. Of course Karl would reject their
> reconstructions, but I would not expect you to.

Not all scholars suggest that the glottal stop remained in pre-exilic
times.  For example, Zevit who wrote a more recent study of m.l.
apparently suggests that medial ) in z)t and r)$ in pre-exilic inscriptions
was a m.l.

> Now you are beginning to sound like Karl, rejecting standard scholarly
> methods of reconstruction as "circular reasoning". Yes, not all of the
> scholarship of these things is entirely sound, and further work would be
> very useful. But you cannot so easily write off all such reconstruction
> of ancient languages. And you certainly cannot substitute the scholarly
> consensus with your own hypotheses without providing convincing evidence
> both that the consensus is wrong and that your alternative makes sense,
> and is not just unproven speculation.

Huh?  Since when is the assumption that the spelling of Samuel and Kings
-- as we have them today! -- are pre-exilic in nature?  Since when is the
assumption that if a book was composed in pre-exilic times, its current
spelling is pre-exilic?  This is what I call circular reasoning.  What we have
are Biblical spelling, which almost all scholars concur is a later
development than pre-exilic spelling.  The fact that the book is pre-exilic
in nature, which is not agreed in any case for any of these amongst
scholars, does not mean that the spelling is too.  What you may be able
to show is that the spelling of the Torah is relatively earlier than
the spelling
of Samuel which is relatively earlier than the spelling of Chronicles.  But
you may also be able to explain that in the sense of the times the
spelling was fixed, or in the case of Samuel and Chronicles, the time of
composition.  In any case, all this may tell you is how the spelling
developed in the Second Temple period only.  You cannot conclude from
this anything regarding the First Temple period.

Yitzhak Sapir