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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] History of matres lectionis, was CV syllables
  • Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:40:49 +0000

On 12/02/2006 00:56, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
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. ...

Unfortunately I am also unable to do so. But linguistics and comparative Semitics have come a long way since Bergstrasser's day.

... 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. ...

Well, if it is indeed the case that final -h was lost in words ending -ah but not in words ending -oh, which became -oah, that would be a possible explanation. But you would then have to explain why final -h is lost in the name Shlomo(h) but not in his other name Yediyah (with mappiq), among other words ending in a full "a" vowel (not just furtive patah) and he with mappiq. They may be rare, but even rarities need explanation.

... 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?

Even in biblical Hebrew final (long) -a is not always written with a he mater lectionis, especially in certain verbal endings. Perhaps this rule applied to more verbal endings in inscriptional Hebrew, or there was less consistency in such matters than has been imposed in biblical Hebrew.
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.

Well, it is by no means an "assumption" that -h in these lamed-he verb forms is only a mater lectionis, for this is the Masoretic pronunciation of these forms. It is possible to hypothesise that between a -y or -w ending to such verb forms and the Masoretic and modern Hebrew vowel only ending there was an intermediate stage with an -h ending. But, given that there is no way of telling from inscriptional Hebrew which final he's are pronounced and which are silent, there is as far as I know no evidence available to support this hypothesis. That doesn't mean that the hypothesis is wrong, just that it is unprovable.
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. ...

Why? Is it certain that matres lectionis were never in Ugaritic?

... 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.

My argument is that the change from -ahu to -aw or -o had very likely taken place so long before Hebrew was widely written down that the fact that the same final he could represent both pronunciations is coincidental.
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.

Well, the standard scholarly theory, from what I understand, is that yod and vav were used for final -i and -u respectively but originally all other final vowels were represented by he. It seems a very subjective argument to insist that vav rather than he was used for final -o vowels, especially when it is well known to everyone, except apparently you, that he is used for final -a and -e vowels.
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.

Well, what is the evidence that no m.l. were used before the 9th century? It seems that there is circular reasoning here. The most you can say is that there are no entirely unambiguous m.l.'s before the 9th century/
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.

The answer is obvious: the few pre-exilic inscriptions which survive almost all date from long after the period of Solomon and the destruction of Shiloh. So these names and their spellings would only have been preserved on perishable materials such as the precursors of Samuel and Kings.
...

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.

The study which I would like to do, and which is entirely non-circular and based on normal scholarly methods, is to compare the distribution of spellings of words which are spelled differently in different places in the entire corpus of ancient Hebrew, inscriptional, biblical and ideally DSS. I would expect to see evidence of a gradual increase in the use of matres lectionis: inscriptional < Torah ~ Samuel/Kings < post-exilic biblical < DSS. And I would suggest that certain names might prove to be partial exceptions to the general pattern, in that they are spelled in the earlier biblical books in ways which are more characteristic of the general spelling of inscriptional Hebrew. This, if it does actually happen at all regularly, would be evidence that the names in these books tend to be written with pre-exilic spellings, perhaps the original spellings, even while the general orthography of the books was updated. Perhaps I could get a PhD for this study - or has someone done it already?

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





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