Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

vayyixtov Uri Hurwitz
>>Randall Buth has written, inter alia:
"... inside a language
family where older, genetically-tight sister languags
 have established three-vowel systems.">>
>
>  Yes, of course the three vowel system is known
 from the earliest Akkadian evidence. It is however
 interesting to ask whether these early Semites had
 indeed only three vowels, or simply chose to compress
 their vowel markings to the three.>
>

First, it depends how one counts.
Semitists agree that the early western Semitic languages had
six vowel phonemes /ii/ /i/, /aa/ /a/, /uu/ /u/, which can also
be described as 'four', /i/, /a/, /u/ + 'length'. And since length
also applies to consonants, one can simplify the description
by talking about three vowels, since all three vowels are
susceptible to lengthening. (Many languages with phonemic
length in their vowel system do not show symetric patterns
but will typically have more longer vowels than the set of
shorter vowels.)

In most languages one discovers forms that preserve older
forms of a language. These are forms that were protected,
for one reason or another, from phonological or morphological
changes that were generally applied throughout the language.

I can illustrate with three brief examples from Hebrew and then
will briefly go on to the general point.

Qal suffixtense verbs are known in three patterns: qatel, qatol,
and qatal. However, there was a general trend in the language
to 'regularize' the morphology toward 'a', so that 1st and 2nd
person singular forms take 'a':
                             Hafets 'he wanted'  Hafatsti 'I wanted'
    consider also 'ask', that has an 'i' vowel in Arabic history, both
regular sa'il 'he asked' and si'il 'he asked' (some dialects today)
In Hebrew"
sha'al 'he asked' (already regularized to 'a') sha'alti 'I asked'.
However, forms with added suffixes could preserve an older
form of the verb and we get a form that might surprise a beginning
student:
    she'iltihu 'I asked him'
The first 'a' vowel of sha'alti dropped out as a regular feature. But the
second 'a' vowel surprisingly shifted to 'i'.   "What?!"
The 'i' is simply the ancient, original vowel of this word. It is a fossil.
'a' did not perversely change to 'i', but the original 'i' never got erased
or changed from this form. It was 'buried' three syllables inside the
form in a closed, unaccented syllable that resisted vowel reduction
and change.
sha'al was a stative verb.

There are 3 kinds of these verbs, corresponding
to the three vowels i, a, u, and corresponding to the three vowels of
Arabic. qatel and qatol are explained as lowerings of *qatil and *qatul.

There are three kinds of common noun pattern *qitl, *qatl, *qutl, which
have regualrized over the ages into *qet-l/qat-l, *qat-l, *qot-l, the 
so-called
segolate forms.

there are three super short 'shva'-vowels: Hataf-segol, Hataf-pataH,
Hataf-qamats, corresponding to the short sounds 'e', 'a', 'o', which in
turn correspond to the earlier *i, *a, *u. However, while these do
often reflect the etymoloigcal *i, *a, *o vowels, they are not really good
evidence on their own, because such 'doubly-short' vowels could have
naturally have collapsed a larger inventory of short vowels.

>  The Masoretes, much later, had two additional ones:
  Segol and  Tseireh, not to mention the differences
 bweteen Hatafim and regular vowels. >

Yes, but these 'newer vowels', or 'younger vowels' entered the language
and fit into many places without generating new morphological structures
in the ancient core patterns of the language that are attested as
cognate patterns in the genetically related languages.
Hence, there are not five stative verbs qatil, qatel, qatal, qatol, qatul,
only three. There are not five cognate segolate nouns
qitl, qetl, qatl, qotl, qutl.

>  And, interestingly, while classical Arabic has only
 the three traditional vowels familiar from the Akkadian,
 the spoken Arabic has a clear Segol/Tseireh vowel: Khirbeh,
 sheikh and so on.>

this shows a natural develop within Arabic along the same trajectory
as Hebrew. Many, of course, show the history of 'ay' becoming 'e' and
'aw' becoming 'o'.

This email, expanded into a book, would be an introduction into why
three vowels are the satisfactory, sufficient, phonemic vowel inventory
of early western Semitic language systems. Said another way, we
don't find 'minimal pairs' at earlier strata of the language necessitating
more than three vowels, though this is tempered, of course, with some
reasonable allowance for homonyms. See Bauer-Leander
and Jouon-Muraoka.

Randall


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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