Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Spinti <jspinti AT eisenbrauns.com>]

What about bilingual Ugaritic-Akkadian word lists with the same roots? Will 
you dismiss that as irrelevant as well? Sure, it isn't Hebrew, but it is NW 
Semitic; the roots are the same; the verbal system is the same.

James
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James Spinti
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On Oct 6, 2011, at 2:36 PM, K Randolph wrote:

> 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
>> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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