Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

Jim, 

Both you and Kevin are wrong.

The phenomenon of doubling ("gemination") consonants exists in all Semitic 
languages. In those ancient Semitic languages that were written in Cuneiform, 
the doubling is visible when the same consonant is written in two adjacent 
syllables (like shar-ru for "king"). In alphabetic writing, the doubling is 
not visible, unless we use diacritics. In the case of (biblical) Hebrew and 
(biblical) Aramaic, we have the Masoretic dagesh. In the case of Arabic, we 
have the Shadda, which has the same function. 

So what Hebrew and Aramaic have in common is not the phenomenon of doubling, 
but rather the fact that the texts that we read were "dotted" by the 
Masoretes. 

Yigal Levin

-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org 
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of JimStinehart AT aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 4:05 PM
To: randallbuth AT gmail.com; b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dagesh


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.
 
1.  Early Biblical Hebrew was born in the heart of beloved Canaan.  
Aramaic, by sharp contrast, was born way out in eastern Syria.  Why, then, 
would 
Hebrew and Aramaic be the only Semitic languages that have the dagesh 
phenomenon of doubled consonants?  What is the common denominator between 
Hebrew and 
Aramaic, which does not extend to the other Semitic languages?  Could that 
unique common denominator be the presence and influence of Hurrian at the 
birth of each of early Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, a presence that did not 
apply to the birth of the other Semitic languages?  I view the first Hebrews 
as living in the mid-14th century BCE, which is precisely the time of the 
short-lived dominance of many cities in Canaan by Hurrian princelings.  
Aramaic 
was obviously born in the Hurrian heartland.