Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kevin Riley <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>]

When the speakers of language A come across a word in language B that 
doesn't fit the syllable structure of their language, they treat it as 
if it does.  If language A has ka-$ra and language B allows ka$-ra but 
not ka-$ra, it will be heard as ka$-ra.  Most English speakers don't 
beleive they have any trouble saying 'Tonga' or 'Mangaia'.  They simply 
make the -ng- syllable final and don't even notice that 'natives' 
pronounce them as syllable initial.  I don't see why Semitic speakers 
would be different and change a word they can pronounce.

Kevin Riley

On 13/06/2010 1:12 AM, jimstinehart AT aol.com wrote:
> 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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