Peter (and all others interested),
Thank you for your elaborate response to all the several issues
related to my obsession (wayyqtl) ;)
I will treat the issues in the order you come up with them in the mail
I reply to.
It took me a while to write this all down.
I hope the length won't discourage you and others. I want to thank you
all in advance for carefully weighing my arguments, and criticizing
them.
... I feel gemination as a morphosyntactic marker is usually taken
for granted but never really taken seriously. It may be only about
double consonants we usually don't hear when we read the MT ourselves,
but gemination is just as "real" as a suffix, a prefix, a stress shift
or vowel change! Take a look at Arabic for instance, how very much
relevant a double consonant can be.
Talking about Arabic, I think you are the victim of my erroneous
writing on that subject.
I am very sorry, the error harms my own theory.
Here the correction: Egyptian Arabic has *more* consonants that are
not *dis*similated in the "definite article".
The process is dissimilation, and Egyptian Arabic has kept the
original geminated forms in more consonants than MSA.
Example:
iGGawaami` "the mosques"
iKKursi "the chair".
MSA would have -LG- and -LK-, respectively.
(It is not surprising that Egyptian, and not Arabian Arabic for
example, kept this older practice by the way, because Egypt is
sedentary and agrarian, which may explain why its language changes a
little slower, phonologically, than some other dialects. But it's not
my field of expertise)
Sorry for the confusion.
...
Anyway, Job 3,7: גלמוד Galmud.
What is the root? The word is usually understood "hard, infertile,
stony"; we have the Arabic root جمد GMD "be solid, frozen"
(Köhler/HALOT 185, H.Wehr 158). It looks convincing that what we have
in גלמוד is dissimilation of גמוד Ga(m)mud to גלמוד Galmud. ...
***
Then you talked about the apocopation etc., in other words, the
make-up of the yiqtol base. I have to say, this issue is obviously
potentially so complicated that it is beyond me. ...
Why then the preferred apocopation? As I said before, I can imagine,
language being economic, people being lazy ;), that if a verbal form
is getting heavier in the front due to the gemination, it might as
well lose some weight at the back. In a yiqtol verb, presence or
absence of an apocopated ending, or a short -a or -u short vowel in
older phases of Hebrew would have given the yiqtol a certain meaning,
but Hebrew lost its short end vowel anyway, and wayyqtl gets its
meaning out of the gemination. The loose yiqtol is still available in
the short jussive version and in the longer version.
...
For those who want to suppose there was also a preterite yiqtol, I
won't forbid that, but even if this had been the case in proto-Hebrew,
proto-NWSemitic or proto-Semitic, it is not so relevant to the
biblical stage of Hebrew that we find in our MT. Why not? If the
(simple) past tense that Wayyqtl basically is, can be satisfactorily
explained by means of the primary gemination, then "Ockham's razor"
forbids us to *also* try to explain it by means of some proto-Hebrew
preterite yiqtol, which is after all a reconstruction.
One concluding remark on word order: this is best studied by writing aPossibly, but that would skew the analysis of German and Dutch because subordinate clauses are rare in direct speech.
syntax of only those passages in BHebrew prose that clearly represent
direct speech.
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