Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Randall Buth wrote:
>> Yitzhak Sapir katab
>>Actually, Arabic is the evidence that the -h was pronounced.  It is hard to
> explain why both Hebrew and Arabic chose to add an "h" type letter to
> denote the feminine that alternates between t and h.  Why wouldn't Arabic
> choose something based on ta and alif? >
>
> We don't know why Arabic chose 'h' instead of " ' ".
> It's a good question.
> But we can't assume that when they dropped the -t they added an -h SOUND.
> That a dialect or two eventually did so, doesn't really change things. The
> standard pronunciations and Arabic dialects that I know, do not pronounce
> the 'h', and the predecessor was *-at(un), without an 'h'.

Shalom Randall,

One of the reasons I disagree with Blau's argumentation (though I accept the
underlying data) is that he tries to analyze -t to -h as a phonetic sound 
shift.
Here he is probably following the traditional analysis that tried to
interpret the
final -t / -h alteration as a sound shift.  However, from books on
linguistics that
I read, purely phonetic sound shifts are oblivious to word boundary
situations.
As an example: http://books.google.com/books?id=HQiytl3teZIC&pg=PA239
Blau does suggest a possible way that this could be a phonetic sound change,
apparently referring to unexploded stops:

http://books.google.com/books?id=zxKCbu536Z8C&pg=PA359

(Blau quotes a different English phonetics book from 1925 on the issue that is
not immediately or at all accessible to me)

There are several issues to be settled here: again the issue of word boundary
as an environment, and also final vowels which would prevent the environment
where we usually see unexploded stops.  Perhaps both can be explained
together by suggesting that when final vowels dropped the sound change
became active.  Medial syllable final -t- can be explained as restored after
the sound change ceased to be operational in the language.  This idea -- that
the sound change was not operational in the language -- also comes up from
the use of final -t in poetics.  Perhaps in this situation, when the
sound change
is no longer operational and the language retains the reflexes of the sound
change in various words, the words which retained unexploded stops were
interpreted as having a weak -h in those positions.

In any case, Blau views the Arabic evidence as meaning that in Classical 
Arabic
the final -h was pronounced.  As this is evidence both directly in his area of
expertise and also somewhat contradictory to his main thesis, I don't see any
reason to deny it.  Even though I don't agree with his argument, I think his
article on the feminine markers is necessary for any discussion of their
development.

Blau notes evidence from rhymes but does not point to any particular example
of it.  In sura 98, of the eight verses, the first 7 end with ta
marbuta and the last
with the pronoun, which in pausal position loses the final vowel and becomes 
-h.

Yitzhak Sapir