Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Kevin,

I apologize if I misconstrued what you wrote. I actually didn’t see your 
post. I may have missed it, or you may have inadvertently sent it to Jim 
instead of to the list (happens to me a lot). But as long as we are on the 
subject, do we have any evidence of the "weak" BGDKPT in Aramaic, beside 
those texts that the Masoretes dealt with. In other words, is there any 
evidence of this in any Aramaic dialect, besides the Aramaic of the Bible? 
How would we know, lacking nikkud?

Yigal Levin

-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org 
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Riley
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 6:44 AM
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Dagesh

If you read the complete text of what I wrote, rather than Jim's 
condensed version, I wasn't saying that doubling was unique, but that 
lenition of the begadkepat letters was.  I suspect one reason why 
lenition does not occur (as far as we know) in the other languages is 
because they kept the fricatives from Proto-Semitic, and that would 
block any weakening of ptkbdg.  The only connection I made between 
doubling and lenition was that the dagesh used to indicate doubling 
could also indicate non-lenition in the cases where a single consonant 
was not lenited, possibly because length ceased to be phonemic.

Kevin Riley

On 28/10/2010 3:02 PM, Yigal Levin wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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