From: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
To: "K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
Cc: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Pronunciation
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 20:13:37 +0100
From: K Randolph
Actually, no living person knows how the word was pronounced. The
pronunciation that we have dates from a tradition a millennium after
Biblical Hebrew ceased to be a natively spoken language.
One possibility is that Biblical Hebrew was phonetic, with each letter
indicating a syllable, making a possible pronunciation Hei-ya-ka-le. We just
don’t know.
Karl W. Randolph.
***
Well, we know that the word is written Heykhal. And that form makes sense,
it is phonetically between Paleo-Babylonian as represented by the old
loanword Haigalli (well before -2000 BCE) and between more recent forms like
ay-akk- (-1500 BCE) and e-gal, with a collapse of *Hay- into e-. I consider
that the change of the velar into fricative -kh- is Hebrew-made (and yet
younger).
So phonetically Heyk(h)al represents a Sumerian snapshot ca. -2000 BCE
attested in a document Samuel, which is one thousand year younger.
Fascinating.
When did that word enter Hebrew?
Arnaud Fournet
***
On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 5:21 AM, Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>
wrote:
From: "Uri Hurwitz" <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>
hey-khal
***
That word is very interesting.
We have in fact several phonetic snapshots of Sumerian.
S1. is reflected in Hurrian hai-galli
where h is a velar fricative
S2. is Hebrew hey-khal
with a weak laryngeal fricative.
S3. one more stage is Akkadian and Hurrian ay-akk-
where *Hay is ay with no initial at all.
ayakk-u/i is used for goddesses' temples: it's a (partly altered) Sumerian
genitive *hay-an-ak- "house-of"
S4. late stage is just conventional E- with muted-out h and ay > e.
It's intriguing to see that Hebrew has a phonetic stage which probably
reflects the end of the 3rd millennium, sometimes before Sumerian actually
became a dead language.
The attestation in Samuel I.9 sounds like one thousand years older.
I wonder how this can be explained.