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  • From: David Steinberg <david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Stress Lengthening of vowels in Pre-Exilic Hebrew
  • Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 20:22:41 -0400

Stress-related lengthening of vowels seems to set Hebrew, and the other Canaanite languages, off from Arabic and Aramaic. As I understand it there were 3 rounds of stress-related vowel lengthening in Biblical Hebrew (in chronological order) -
a. c. 1000 BCE, triggered by the loss of case endings, the stressed short vowels were lengthened in nouns and adjectives in the absolute form;
b. post-exilic general lengthening of stressed vowels including in verbs;
c. lengthening of pretonic vowels

About the first of these Blau wrote (slightly adapted):
As for the dropping of the final short vowels, it took place ap­parently in three stages. At first, nouns in status constructus dropped their final short vowels ..., then verbs and at last nouns (including participles) in status absolutus. *Owing to the elision of short final vowels in the status absolutus, short vowels in the preceding open syllable which now had become closed, were compensatorily lengthened* (viz. a to a:, i to e:, and u to o:; as *?da*gu > *da:**g* "fish"; ya*?shi*nu > ya*?she:**n* "sleeping"; ya*?gu*ru > ya*?go:**r* "being afraid"). This compensatory lengthening did not take place during the dropping of the final short vowels from the status constructus and verbs, and since during its operation these word classes already exhibited closed final syllables, they were not lengthened at all (therefore: *da*g "fish of"; shamar "he kept", with final short vowels, viz, patah. Since the sere and holem in "he slept" and "he was afraid" correspond to patah, they have to be considered short as well, whereas the same words when serving as participles contain long sere and holem; similarly nishmar qtl as against the participle nishma:r, hubhdal/yubhdal qtl/yqtl against the participle mubhda:l ).



My questions are, in the light of Blau's mstatement,



1. In pre-exilic Hebrew would the qal infinitive construct have been pronounced:

- in isolated form qu'to:l or q'to:l eg. lashu'mo:r or lash'mo:r - "to guard"

- in construct form qu'tul or q'tul eg. shumur ha'ish or shmur ha'ish - "the guarding of/by the man"?



2. In pre-exilic Hebrew would <dbr> "word" have been pronounced:

- da'ba:r (<da'baru) in absolute singular

- dabar (<dabaru) in construct singular and

- daba'ri:m (<daba'ri:ma) in plural?



David Steinberg

http://www.houseofdavid.ca/





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