Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Karl,

I'll only comment on part of what you wrote...

On Sat, 8 Oct 2011 08:36:11 -0700, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> To give an example from another family group: Japanese and Korean are
> cognate languages, however far enough apart that they are not mutually
> understandable. For centuries Korean has been a CVC language. Only in the
> last few decades as Japanese borrows loan words from other languages is
> Japanese becoming a CVC language after centuries of being a CV language.
> From what I have been told, Japanese was the only CV language in its
> language family. If we had only the cognate languages as clues, would we
> have learned that about Japanese?

First of all, I'd better state that I'm in agreement with most other people
that BH was a CVC language.  Nevertheless, in your comparison with the
relationship of Korean with Japanese you bring up a very interesting point.
I will correct your understanding only to the extent of maintaining that not
only has Japanese been a CV language in the past, but it still is one.
Apparent exceptions when one sees Japanese words transliterated into English
can be misleading, e.g., J. _kaban_ ("bag") is to be analysed in terms of
Japanese itself as /ka-ba-n/, i.e., as three syllables, with the last one
being a syllabic nasal.

Why languages shift this way in their basic syllabic structure is obscure, but
it does happen.  To cite an example from a language group likely to be more
familiar to people on this list, the Latin word for the 3rd person plural
present indicative of the verb "to be" is _sunt_, "(they) are".  The Spanish
equivalent is _son_, which clearly derives from its Latin antecedent by simple
phonetic transformations.  But then one sees the Italian _sono_.  Where did
the final "o" come from?  It makes no sense on a simple phonetic level, but
only on the basis that Italian has historically been transitioning from a more
complex syllabic structure (Latin allows syllables that can be as complex as
CCCVCC) to a simpler one, though the process was never completed in Italian
to the extent that it was in Japanese.

But, to return to the point at hand, although the comparison of Korean with
Japanese does show that genetically related languages can end up with quite
different structures, it is also true that Korean and Japanese, although
related, are related much more distantly than say Hebrew and Aramaic.

-- 
Will Parsons