Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

wayyish'al Yig'al
>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?

Ironically, it is actually Aramaic where we have good ancient evidence.
systematically, Aramaic of the early/mid First Temple period had words
that etymologically line up with 'th' and 'dh' (interdental fricatives) as
evidenced in Arabic and Ugaritic. Those words were spelled with
shin and zayin in that period, e.g., yashub 'he will return'. However, at the
end of the First Temple period Aramaic texts start spelling the same
set of etymological interdentals with tav and dalet. So words like
*yashub become spelled ytwb and *zahab becomes dahab.
The linguistic explanation that explains this is that 'sh' and 'z' were
graphs that were chosen for writing 'th' and 'dh' sounds. However,
during the First Temple period Aramaic developed fricativization with
simple stops following vowels. So the 't' phoneme became pronounced
as 'th' post-vocalically, otherwise 't'; 'd' became 'dh' postvocalically,
otherwise 'd'. Consequently, the words with phonemic 'th' and 'dh'
were realigned in speakers' minds as allonphones of 't' and 'd', so
that a word like early 'thub' "to return" (written 'shub') became to be
spoken as 'tub' and thus written with tav. This happened across the
board with all of the words that were etymologically interdental
fricatives so that we can state that by Jeremiah's time the Aramaic
language had developed 'begedkefet' allophons and these remained
constant in the language ever since, with the spelling
regularizing during the Second Temple period to reflect the new
sound system. that is, for some time people would write with the old
spelling system, a 'historical spelling', even though the referential
sound of the word had changed. Note that Jer 10.11 has the די di
spelling for etymological 'dhi' "that, because; of" yet shows historical
spelling with ארקא 'earth' while also using his contemporary 'modern'
ארעא. (Historical spelling is similar to English writing "through" [thru]
even though [sic, tho] we have dropped the velar fricative ending centuries
ago.)
This explanation, of course, covers attested Aramaic inscriptions and
records from the 9thC BCE through the 1stC BCE and is not limited
to Biblical Aramaic or the MT.


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