Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Dear Jim,

What HALOT says is that Akkadian beru is the cognate, and a couple of other
words are loanwords into Akkadian from Aramaic.  My understanding is that
when these words were borrowed, they were borrowed with the kh-type het
which remained in Akkadian, because that was the closest sound in Akkadian
to the h-type het of the Aramaic original.  However, even if the sound change 
in
Akkadian was no longer active, and Akkadian could withstand the h-type het
in new words (mostly borrowed ones), this says nothing of the earlier period
where Akkadian lost the h-type het due to a regular and exception-less sound
change.

Jim, I suggest the following references:
Alice Faber's "Innovation, Retention and Language Comparison: An Introduction
to Historical/Comparative Linguistics", in Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew, 
ed.
Walter Bodine. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, p. 191-207
http://books.google.com/books?id=lu-KtDFN9r8C&pg=PA191

Don Ringe's "Reconstructed Ancient Languages" in The Cambridge Encyclopedia
of the World's Ancient Languages, p. 1112-1128.
While you're at it, check out p. 236 of the same book, in the article
on Akkadian,
where item 4 discusses this very sound change.

Hans H. Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQiytl3teZIC

One sort of disappointment in Faber's otherwise wonderful article is that she
considers word-final position as a suitable phonological environment for
sound change, and gives as an example of regular sound change the loss
of short word-final vowels in Hebrew:
http://books.google.com/books?id=lu-KtDFN9r8C&pg=PA198

This is according to Hock not exactly right, and I think Hock is right here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQiytl3teZIC&pg=PA239

Hock suggests that it is related to an analogical process (above, p. 239).  I
prefer this explanation also because this explains how sometimes these word-
final vowels seem to remain as in xayto-arets ("creature of the land")
and other
such examples.

Anyway, all of these are really good and you should read them all in order to
understand how linguistics work.  If what you want to do is "to get people to
do a basic linguistic analysis," then you should understand how linguistics
works.

Yitzhak Sapir