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  • From: jimstinehart AT aol.com
  • To: George.Athas AT moore.edu.au, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Initial Consonant Clusters in Biblical Hebrew
  • Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:12:23 -0400




George:

What you wrote applies only if we were not dealing with a foreign loanword.
If there were no foreign loanword involved, then I would agree with you that:

“Consonant clustering occurs within a single syllable. It doesn't apply
across
two syllables. So the reason Hebrew has no problem with a word like Ka$Ra is
because it has no consonant clustering. It has two distinct normal
syllables:
Ka$-Ra. There is no consonant clustering here. Your theory depends on Hebrew
trying to deal with consonant clustering in this word, but it's just not
there
to begin with.”

Non-Semitic languages, like English and Hittite and Kassite, routinely have
true consonant clusters in a single syllable. English has shrill, shrew,
shroud, shrimp, etc. as single syllables, even though Hebrew would be
expected to break up such a foreign word into two syllables. As to Hittite,
which may have some affinities to the little-known language of Kassite: “We
know that Hittite had initial, internal, and final consonant clusters.”
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/hitol-1-X.html

We appear to have both DI-Tu-$ra-tta in Hittite, and Tu-$ra-tta in Hurrian,
attested in the ancient world. [I say “appear”, because the sources are
often confusing and inconsistent as to syllable division.] Svah is a single
syllable in Sanskrit. Kassite often uses Sanskrit in names of gods and
kings, and Kassite is often thought to have some affinities with Hurrian and
Hittite, while being completely different from Semitic languages.

We know for sure that Akkadian and Kassite were not a good mix, with the two
languages being entirely different from each other. “Wide variation in the
writing of Kassite [in Akkadian] shows that this tongue sounded very strange
to Babylonian scribes, and it must have had a very different structure from
that of Akkadian….” Walter Sommerfeld, “The Kassites of Ancient
Mesopotamia”, in Jack M. Sasson ed. “Civilizations of the Ancient Near East”
(2000), at p. 917.

>From the foregoing, it is likely (if not certain) that (i) Ka-$ra or Ka$-$ra
>was easy to say in Kassite, but (ii) Ka-$ra or Ka$-$ra was virtually
>impossible to say in Akkadian (or in Hebrew or any other Semitic language).
>Yes, Ka$-ra or Ka$$-ra would be easy to say in Akkadian or Hebrew, but that
>was not what the Kassites were saying. The basic Sanskrit word is ku-$a,
>not ku$-a. Adding the comparative suffix –iyar or –ra resulted in something
>like Ka-$a-ra in Sanskrit [magical 7th mountain], but the Kassite equivalent
>of that word may have been pronounced as only two syllables: Ka-$ra or
>Ka$-$ra.

My theory of the case is that Ka-$ra in Kassite came out as Ka-ra in Akkadian
and as Ka-$a in Biblical Hebrew. The Akkadians initially tried to reproduce
the consonant cluster $ra of their new masters from the Zagros Mountains.
But consistent with linguistic theory, the very difficult to pronounce $ra
eventually was simplified to ra in Akkadian. As I quoted before: “The
evidence comes primarily from an observation known as the CODA/ONSET
ASYMMETRY. In many languages, consonant clusters simplify by deleting the
first consonant, but never the second one (Wilson 2000, 2001, Steriade,
forthcoming): /patka/E[paka], not [pata].” John J. McCarthy, “The Gradual
Path to Cluster Simplification” (2008), linguist at University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
_http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1083&context=linguist_faculty_pubs_


The Hebrew author of Genesis 11: 28, 31 knew both Ka$-$u as the name of the
Kassite people, and Ka-ra as the Akkadianized first two syllables of the
Kassite name of Kassite Babylonia in the Amarna Letters. He perhaps
correctly surmised that Ka-ra was Akkadian styling, not Kassite, and more
importantly he knew that his Hebrew audience might be confused by Ka-ra,
which does not seem very close to Ka$-$u. So he brilliantly chose to use
Ka-$a for the first two syllables of the Hebrew version of the Kassite name
of Kassite Babylonia. That doesn’t match the Amarna Letters, because the
Hebrew author properly chose not to follow the Akkadianized version, since a
more authentic Kassite version would in this particular case be easier for
his Hebrew audience to understand; at least some people in that Hebrew
audience knew the Kassites as Ka$-$u.

That’s my theory of the case. I am trying to explain why the first two
syllables of the Kassite name of Kassite Babylonia at Genesis 11: 28, 31 are
Ka-$a, whereas they are Ka-ra in the Akkadian cuneiform of the Amarna
Letters. To me, the underlying reason is that a Kassite consonant cluster
could not be handled well by Semitic languages, and Akkadian and Hebrew went
different routes in trying to deal with the tongue-twister Kassite consonant
cluster $ra.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston Illinois




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