Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:22 AM, David Steinberg <davidwrote:
> 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) -

How would you know when we have no information on stress in the
Canaanite languages except for Hebrew?  How do you establish
a shared innovation when you have no data on who else shares it?

> 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.

Blau is a respected linguist, but I find his ideas inconsistent with
recent research in linguistics, such as Hetzron's.   Here, he seems
to suggest that the dropping of final vowels is a sound change.  He
doesn't say it outright but that is the impression one receives.  It is
unlikely to be a sound change, though:
a) A sound change is regular and in the particular phonological
environment in which it is observed, unconditional.    Final short
vowels were retained in the end of the 2s suffixes of verbs -
$amarta, $amarti.  The final vowels were lengthened very late.
b) The end of a word is not a suitable phonological environment.
c) Neither is the morphological class of the word.
All these reasons, along with the fact that final vowels were retained
as a feature of some "archaic Hebrew" (such as "xayto arets"),
suggests that this is not a sound change.

> 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"

My own feeling based on comparative evidence including Samaritan
Hebrew, is that it would have been pronounced l$mvr, with a
consonant cluster at the beginning of the word. (v is a vowel, but I'm
not committing myself to which vowel).

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

Again, $mvr.

> 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?

I think that final short vowels dropped during the exilic period.  Also,
I don't think that the masculine plural was ever -ma and not -m.  Its
presence in EA is an artifact of the orthography.

Yitzhak Sapir