Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 08:02:35 +0200, Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il> 
wrote:
> 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?

There's the evidence of Syriac, which uses diacritics similar in function
to daghesh/raphe.  Since the "weak" forms of BGDKPT occur in situations
very similar to BH/BA, I think it can be regarded as corroborating that the
spirantization is characteristic of Aramaic in general.  The question is
whether Hebrew and Aramaic developed the phenomenon together as a result of
their close relationship and and physical proximity, or whether the Hebrew
development is a direct result of Aramaic influence (speaking Hebrew with an
Aramaic accent, as it were).

> -----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.

-- 
William Parsons