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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Pronunciation

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  • From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
  • To: "K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Pronunciation
  • Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 20:13:37 +0100


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




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