Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

From: K Randolph

Actually, no living person knows how the word was pronounced. The 
pronunciation that we have dates from a tradition a millennium after 
Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a natively spoken language.
One possibility is that Biblical Hebrew was phonetic, with each letter 
indicating a syllable, making a possible pronunciation Hei-ya-ka-le. We just 
don’t know.
Karl W. Randolph.

***

Well, we know that the word is written Heykhal. And that form makes sense, 
it is phonetically between Paleo-Babylonian as represented by the old 
loanword Haigalli (well before -2000 BCE) and between more recent forms like 
ay-akk- (-1500 BCE) and e-gal, with a collapse of *Hay- into e-. I consider 
that the change of the velar into fricative -kh- is Hebrew-made (and yet 
younger).
So phonetically Heyk(h)al represents a Sumerian snapshot ca. -2000 BCE 
attested in a document Samuel, which is one thousand year younger.
Fascinating.
When did that word enter Hebrew?


Arnaud Fournet
***







On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 5:21 AM, Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr> 
wrote:


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

hey-khal

***

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