Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:44 PM, David Steinberg wrote:
> Dr Sapir -
> Thanks for your response.
>
> Re stress in Canaanite languages. I agree that our only strong evidence is
> from Hebrew. However, the situation in spoken Arabic seems to me to be that
> short vowels often disappear when unstressed and long vowels often, and in
> Egyptian always, shorten when unstressed while stressed short vowels do not
> generally lengthen. In Aramaic, it would seem that short stressed short
> vowels do not generally lengthen. These patterns contrast with  biblical
> Hebrew, as reflected in the Tiberian tradition where  all stressed vowels
> are long.

Hello.  First off, I don't have a PhD or any academic degree in the area of
Biblical studies or related fields.  I am at best well read in the
field.  Second,
even if you have conclusions based on Arabic and Aramaic, this allows you
to make no conclusions regarding Canaanite.  In order to show some feature
of the language sets off Canaanite from other languages, you must show:
a) that feature is an innovation -- it was new and different from the more
archaic system previous to that feature.
b) that feature is shared among the Canaanite languages.
You are going to be unable to show stress is shared because you have no
information regarding stress from Phoenician, Ammonite, Ugaritic, etc.
Therefore, you can not say whether a change in stress (linguistically, an
innovation) was specific to all Canaanite languages or only to Hebrew.

Yitzhak Sapir