Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>]

Or there was a consistent sound change so that in Akkadian all  
laryngeals - ), h , ḥ, (, and ġ were reduced to aleph which wasn't  
indicated in the orthography when word initial.

Your example of )QR) is attested in Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic  
and Mandaic, all eastern dialects, where the change of ḥ > ) is also  
common, most likely because of Akkadian influence (See Kutscher,  
"Aramaic", in Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa  
(Current Trends in Linguistics 6), 373). In contrast, XQR) is  
attested in Jewish Literary Aramaic which is a western dialect. There  
is no attestation of QR for citadel, nor are )QR) and XQR)  
"interchangeable" in any given dialect.

Peter Bekins

> Conclusion
>
> An initial heth/X in Biblical Hebrew is not always part of a  
> word’s original
> root.  A word that begins with a heth/X may be simply a variant of  
> a word that
> begins with a mere vowel-type sound, such as an initial prosthetic  
> aleph (or
> a yod/Y, etc.).
>
> So )BL and XBL may have the same root, and be mere variants of the  
> same basic
> word.  And YBL.  And XBR (since resh/R and lamed/L were sometimes
> interchangeable in the Bronze Age).
>
> We see that an initial heth/X is, in some cases, much less  
> important than is
> usually supposed, being the functional equivalent of a mere  
> prosthetic aleph.
>
> Jim Stinehart
> Evanston, Illinois