Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 7:05 AM,  <JimStinehart AT aol.com> wrote:
>> Kevin Riley wrote:  “While the change  [--] … doubling the letter, placing 
>> a
>> dagesh within it, or any other device one can think of… [--] is unique to
>> Aramaic and Hebrew (or, at least, the marking of it is) among the Semitic
>> languages, it is a process that is familiar to most linguists. There is no
>> need for an external influence, especially for one that ceased to exist
>> centuries before we have any evidence of lenition existing in Hebrew and
>> Aramaic.  By natural, homegrown linguistic processes Hebrew and Aramaic 
>> came
>> to have lenited and unlenited consonants.”
>
> Something seems seriously askew here.

Not.

>
...
> 4.  How can Biblical Hebrew experts be so sure that “There is no need for an
> external influence”?  Both Hebrew and Aramaic have doubled
> consonants/dagesh, like Hurrian;

You seem to be confusing two items, possibly based on the way that people
talk about the orthography.

fricativization/lenition of stops between vowels is one phenomenon, and
common in languages. You need look no further than HABANA, which is
heard as 'Havana' by Anglos. In Spanish, the etymological Latin *b, *d,
and *g are soft/fricative after vowels. A natural process like Kevin 
mentioned.
A second common witness--look at Greek where *b and *g became fricatives
by the first century (entering NT manuscript tradition in our earliest long
Pauline p46 (late 2nd century) with Σιλβανου SILBANOY at 2Cor 1.19
for SILOYANOY,.

A second, separate phenomenon is so-called 'doubling', which is phonetically
a time-lengthened consonant. This is still functional and heard today in
Arabic, marked orthographically with shadda, where consonants are lengthened
without any relationship to fricativization. It is part of the structural,
morphological backbone of the language and encountered in the fa``al(a)
binyan (etymologically equivalent to Hebrew pi``el). Of particular
interest is the
strength and stability of these lengthened consonants in the history of
Arabic. The Arabic af`al(a), equivalent to the Hebrew hif`il, has dropped out
of much colloquial use because its prefix conjugation was easily confused
with the "qal" prefix conjugation as vowels mutated in various dialects (like
*yaktub > yiktib). But the fa``al(a) has remained in full use. This is one of
many examples of consonant length in Semitic languages.

> the spelling of Hebrew and Aramaic is
> essentially identical from day #1,

except that they are not identical.

> even though the only common denominator
> between these two west Semitic languages from the opposite corners of the
> ancient near east would seem to be that both were uniquely born in a Hurrian
> cauldron;

except that they almost in a dialect continuum coming right down thru
Damascus along the east side of the Jordan.

Having said the above, I don't discount a Hurrian connection out of hand
and have not looked at the evidence myself. The point above is simply
that we are not compelled to go that route because of some unique,
otherwise inexplicable phenomenon.

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