Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Pre-exilic evidence against GIGO Hebrew

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: tedbro AT aol.com
  • To: yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Pre-exilic evidence against GIGO Hebrew
  • Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:40:54 EST

Yitzak:

I'm not familiar with the linguistic issues, but aren't there an abundance
of single sylabel word written in either CVC of CC form? Several quickly
come to mind; sus - horse, shem - name, chag - circle, kol - all, dag -
fish, etc. etc, etc. Does the proposal of open syllable pre-exilic Hebrew
apply
only to multisylable words?

Ted Brownstein
In a message dated 1/21/2010 1:22:34 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com writes:

It has been claimed that the evidence f

or "CVC" Hebrew is only
post-exilic, when Aramaic influence spread. However, the
question is how one defines evidence. Well, we've all been
in the evidence discussions. I just wanted to point out various
kinds of evidence against this idea, that just happens to be
post-exilic. Yes, it is true that pre-exilic Hebrew does not
have vowels. However, whether Aramaic, Phoenician, Ugaritic,
or Hebrew, the orthography has an interesting peculiarity.
That is, if the letter is doubled it is written once. Said another
way, if a letter has no vowel afterwards, and the same letter
follows, it is written down only once. In NWS languages, another
factor is that n without a vowel assimilates to the following
consonant, so that the doubling is again shown by only one
letter. Elements of this situation can be found in pre-exilic
inscriptions. For example:

Siloam: mn hmwc) vs. mymn (doubling of y)
Lachish: #6 xy yhwh vs #3 xyhwh
Arad: Lachish #4 ntn (and elsewhere) vs Arad #2 wntt or
#40 nttm (doubling of the second t, in each case)

In the first two examples above we can also probably
conclude that mn and xy were single syllable words.

I'd also point out the same situation exists in Moabite, with
wkrty (doubling of t) from the root krt as in mkrtt, but I don't
consider Moabite a type of Hebrew.

Yitzhak Sapir




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page