Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Will Parsons:

You wrote:  “As I understand it, "nunation" and "mimation" refer to the use of /n/ or /m/ in inflexional singular case endings (already dropped in Biblical Hebrew).”

My, you’re going  w-a-y  back there.  Mimation was already out of style by the time of the Amarna Letters in the mid-14^th century BCE!

“[T]he phenomenon of mimation…was a common feature of the Semitic languages until the first half of the second [millennium] B.C.  Mimation is the addition of an m after the case ending of the singular noun.  …In the Amarna Letters there are still remnants of mimation in historical spellings of Akkadian words and in other forms, although it is evident that mimation had already disappeared for other purposes.”  Shlomo Izre’el, “The El-Amarna Letters from Canaan”,  Interdisciplinary Bible Scholar 1 (1979), p. 17.  http://academia.edu/371049/The_El-Amarna_Letters_from_Canaan

But if I may digress, much more important than that from the standpoint of Biblical studies is the key fact that cuneiform (such as in the Amarna Letters) can’t handle gutturals:

“[E]ven for the [east Semitic] Akkadian language, cuneiform was not really suitable….  It was even less suitable for writing the Northwestern Semitic languages [Canaanite and Hebrew]….  [In particular,] there was no convenient way to transcribe the gutturals….”  P. 20.

T-h-a-t  is why no one can understand the name “Potipherah”, which is P W+  Y  P R( in the received alphabetical Hebrew text.  But because of the “confusion of gutturals” in dealing with the original cuneiform writing of this Biblical Egyptian name, that’s a bollixed up version [as to the last letter only, which is a guttural] of what was supposed to be pA-wA.ti -- pA rx:  the final letter was intended to be Hebrew heth/X, but because of the “confusion of gutturals” that is inherent in cuneiform writing, it mistakenly came out as Hebrew ayin/(.

We may see the exact same confusion between final heth/X and final ayin/( in the old west Semitic word for  “arm”, once again involving cuneiform and its “confusion of gutturals”.  At Amarna Letter EA 287: 27 from Jerusalem, this Canaanite word [as a Canaanite gloss in the cuneiform text] is spelled zu-ru-ux, with the ending being heth/X in Akkadian-style cuneiform.  But the actual ending of that word is west Semitic ayin/(, as we see for example at Exodus 6: 6:  Biblical Hebrew ZRW(, where the last letter is ayin/(, not heth/X.  [The Hebrew vav/W there is plene spelling, representing the vowel U [and perhaps also indicating that the third syllable, unlike the first two syllables, is a VC syllable], and with the final letter being ayin/(.]

Mimation and confusion of gutturals.  That takes us all the long way back to the Bronze Age, before any mistakes had yet been made in later transforming the original cuneiform written version of the Patriarchal narratives into alphabetical Biblical Hebrew in late 7^th century BCE Jerusalem.

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois

-----Original Message-----
From: Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
To: Yigal.Levin <Yigal.Levin AT biu.ac.il>
Cc: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sat, Jun 29, 2013 7:25 pm
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Daniel 12:13

Hello Yigal,

On Sat, 29 Jun 2013 22:02:40 +0300, Yigal Levin <Yigal.Levin AT biu.ac.il> wrote:
> "Nunation", using a nun for the plural instead of mem, is a well-know
> phenomenon of Mishnaic Hebrew, apparently due to Aramaic influence. As Ken
> mentioned below, it is also well-known in the DSS. It was fairly standard in
> the Hebrew of the Second Temple period and later. Even in the Iron Age, it
> appeared in Moabite and Ammonite. Not surprising to find it in Daniel,
> considering the fairly late date of its composition, and the fact that the
> writer was obviously bi-lingual.

I would agree that the phenomenon is due to Aramaic influence, but I
hesitate at your usage of the term "nunation" to describe it.  As I
understand it, "nunation" and "mimation" refer to the use of /n/ or
/m/ in inflexional singular case endings (already dropped in Biblical
Hebrew).  If my understanding is incorrect, feel free to correct me!

--
Will Parsons
μὴ φαίνεσθαι, ἀλλ' εἶναι.
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