... I'm not saying that there isn't evidence for a medial shift from W to YFor some better evidence, consider the known correspondence Hebrew HYH ~ Aramaic (and perhaps occasional Hebrew) HW'/HWH ~ Arabic HWY. Also Hebrew XYH ~ Phoenician XW' and the name XAWWAH "Eve" which is explained as linked with XYH. And then there are many "hollow" roots where medial Y and W interchange.
in Hebrew, but I don't think this argument works.
This implies the pronunciation of the Masoretes or at the earliest of the Hebrew Bible authors. The pronunciation YAHWEH may have become frozen long before that. In Arabic the first vowel of the imperfect is A, and this was probably true in earlier stages of Hebrew as well. If I remember rightly, there was a regular and quite late sound shift by which short A in the first syllable shifted to I.Yahweh would then be a Qal imperfect form. The Qal normally takes an /I/ vowel under the preformative YOD, but the /A/ vowel is influenced by the gutteral HE that tends to prefer /A/ vowels over the /I/ vowel of the paradygm for Qal imperfects and caused the /I/ to gravitate to that /A/ vowel. Thus the /A/ vowel has nothing to do with the hiphil form, even though it would be a homonym of a hypothetical hiphil form, but has to do with the gutteral in the root.
But the regular Qal prefixal forms from HYH show an i-vowel. Even Qal
forms from the root XYH, with a stronger gutteral xet, show an i-vowel.
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