Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

Let’s look at your evidence:

Arabic, different language and late, irrelevant.
Aramaic, different language and what evidence for vowels is there that is
not late?
MT points, late after a time when it is admitted that unstressed vowels were
dropped.

What you need for evidence is direct transliterations dating from the times
of the Kings from Hebrew to a language that had vowels. Even
transliterations from Aramaic won’t do, as it was a language so different
from Hebrew that people speaking one language could not understand the
language of the other (one could have been a CV language at the same time
the other a CVC language). Do you have any transliterations directly from
Hebrew to a language with vowels dating from the times of the Kings to back
up your claims?

Randall: “This is important because Karl has frequently claimed that during
the exile or shortly after the Jewish people suddenly forgot BH and used
Aramaic to fill in what was missing.” “suddenly”? “forgot”?

I: Not at all. The Babylonian Captivity itself lasted three generations or
close to it. The people were scattered and in daily contact with a majority
population speaking Aramaic. Already most of the people who were brought
from Judea, the immigrant generation, would learn at least some Aramaic, the
younger ones becoming fluent. Many brought over as little children and the
first generation born in Babylon, by the time they reached child bearing age
would know Aramaic better than they knew Hebrew. Even if they tried to
maintain a Hebrew speaking household and sent their children to Hebrew
school, when their children came off the street speaking Aramaic, they would
answer in Aramaic. By the generation who were young adults who went to Judea
at the end of the Babylonian Captivity, the majority if not almost all, were
more at home in Aramaic and tended to speak Aramaic to each other, in
business, in their homes, instead of Hebrew. Oh they studied Hebrew, it was
the language of religion, government and high literature, but even their
pronunciation of Hebrew would be influenced by the language they knew best,
namely Aramaic. This “suddenly” was not very sudden, it was a
multi-generational process.

Add a few generations to the time of Ezra, and the number of people who
learned Hebrew as their first language would be vanishingly small, if any.
While the people would leave the written Hebrew text unchanged, because it
had no vowels, they would give it the Aramaic vowels as they read it.

What was forgotten were rarely used words, but that written in Tanakh was
almost all passed on to the younger generations.

In closing, you have no valid evidence for your claims.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps the time has come to clear up a question that seems to recur on
> b-hebrew concerning the shape of Hebrew words.
>
> The following was raised on a different thread and needs its own thread to
> be discussed
>
> >As far as pronunciation, when we look at poetry, if we read it as each
> letter representing a syllable consisting of a consonant followed by a
> vowel, the text then has a meter, a rhythm, that it lacks when read with
> modern pronunciation. However, the modern pronunciation or a reconstruction
> of Tiberian pronunciation based largely on Yemenite pronunciation, are very
> similar and the most widely known, therefore any teaching should teach
> that.
> >
>
> That proposal by Karl is that Hebrew was a CV(CV)(CV)-only language.
> (C=consonant, V=vowel)
> The contention of all Hebraists that I know is that Hebrew has both CV and
> CVC syllables.
> I find the CV-only proposal to be untenable, so maybe it would be good to
> see its 'evidence'.
>
> The poetic argument above seems impossible to demonstrate consistently
> and it becomes highly subjective.
> E.g. Ex 15:4 (filling in 'v' for any vowel)
> תהמת יכסימו  tvhvmvtv yvkvsvyvmvwv (10)
> ירדו במצולת כמו-אבן  yvrvdvwv bvmvSvwvlvtv kvmvwv 'vbvnv (16)
> (in traditional terms this is a 2 beats plus 3 beats.)
>
> On the other hand, there is excellent morphological evidence for CVC
> syllables in BH.
> Any syllable pattern must explain its relationship to sister languages and
> must reasoably explain the trajectory and changes within the languages.
> E.g., BH katabti 'I wrote' has a CVC syllable in -tab- according to the MT.
> Also katabta 'you wrote' with CVC.
>
> One must ask whether or not that reflects the biblical language. Did BH
> have
> CVC syllables?
>
> One may look at sister languages and see what developments took place and
> propose explanations that can can cover the overall developments and
> relationships, just like what is done in IndoEuropean languages.
>
> Arabic has katabtu 'I wrote' katabta 'you wrote' with a CVC syllable in
> exactly the same place. Also the same 'a' vowels. Hb and Ab diverge in the
> final vowel 1p and i/u splits are quite common between languages and
> dialects. Both i/u are  'high' vowels. In fact, many Arabic dialects today
> have words that differ in i/u across dialects yaktub/yiktib/yaktib 'he will
> write'. uzen/izen 'ear'
>
> Aramaic is genetically closer to Hebrew than Arabic. (this is seen in the
> binyan structures where Arm-Hb are tighter than Arabic is with either, and
> in overall shared vocabulary that is 'genetic' [ereS 'earth' Aram ara`] and
> not 'borrowed') What does Arm have?
> katbet 'I wrote', ketabta/ketabt(e) 'you wrote'. It has -tab- like the
> others in 2s but has a closed syllable -bet in the 1s.
> A historical linguist finds this helpful from several directions. First,
> the
> connection between Arabic and Hebrew, even though more distantly related
> than Hb-Arm, preserves a -tab- syllable in the 1s, which points to Aramaic
> as an innovator for this feature. (It apparently dropped its 1s vowel and
> then resolved the consonants with a new vowel.) Secondly, it shows that the
> Hebrew pattern did not develop from Aramaic. This is important because Karl
> has frequently claimed that during the exile or shortly after the Jewish
> people suddenly forgot BH and used Aramaic to fill in what was missing.
> That
> is not an explanation that any historical linguist will be able to accept
> as
> explaining the above evidence. It's just not in the cards. Thirdly, the MT
> preserves the archaic -tab- syllable in the 1s, which is one piece of
> evidence showing the conservative nature of the MT morphology.
>
> Nouns show similar congruence across these languages.
> The noun pattern *maktab/*miktab is preserved in all three languages,
> suggesting that it is genetically shared from a period before they split
> from each other. Note the CVC-CVC pattern
> The segolates also show preservation from before their divergence. E.g. Heb
> malki is like Arabic malki is like Aramaic malki, despite the fact that the
> lemma form is melek in Hebrew. This is explained by the old case system
> where *malk-un dropped the case -un and then the resulting CvCC resolved
> itself by becoming CvCvC malik>melek. Similar changes are seen today in
> colloquial Arabic where the dropping of the case system results in CvCC
> becoming CvCvC.
> This all makes perfect historical linguistic sense. Plus the vowels in the
> CvCC-un words can be traced accross the languages and certain
> correspondences are seen that prove a genetic, developmental relationship
> to
> a historical linguist. E.g. Arabic *u> Hb *o, Ar *a > Hb *e (but remains *a
> where a suffix does not create a need for final CC resolution). Ar *i > Hb
> *e (but *i where a suffix does not creat a need for final CC resolution.)
>
> These can be multiplied with hundreds of specific examples.  (e.g. Ar
> kalb-un, 'dog' kalbi 'my dog', Heb keleb kalbi.)
>
> In choosing between such an analysis that has CVC already in the period of
> BH and an analysis that has only CV, there would seem to be only one
> rational choice for a historical linguist. CVC. I claim that it is the only
> tenable view. So it would be nice if this thread can bring the issue to a
> close for b-Hebrew.
>
> braxot
>
> Randall Buth
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
> Biblical Language Center
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