Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>]

From: "Uri Hurwitz" <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>


>  hey-khal
>
>  The word originates, if memory serves, in Sumerian
> where 'e- gallo' means a large house. This in turn
> appears in Akkadian with the same meaning and then in
> various Semitic languages.
>
> Uri Hurwitz                       Great Neck NY
***

That word is very interesting.

We have in fact several phonetic snapshots of Sumerian.

S1. is reflected in Hurrian hai-galli
where h is a velar fricative

S2. is Hebrew hey-khal
with a weak laryngeal fricative.

S3. one more stage is Akkadian and Hurrian ay-akk-
where *Hay is ay with no initial at all.
ayakk-u/i is used for goddesses' temples: it's a (partly altered) Sumerian 
genitive *hay-an-ak- "house-of"

S4. late stage is just conventional E- with muted-out h and ay > e.

It's intriguing to see that Hebrew has a phonetic stage which probably 
reflects the end of the 3rd millennium, sometimes before Sumerian actually 
became a dead language.

The attestation in Samuel I.9 sounds like one thousand years older.
I wonder how this can be explained.


Arnaud Fournet