Re: New to the List, too

Steg Belsky wrote:

"I recently read an article by Cornell's professor Rendsburg about Ancient Hebrew
phonology, it was the first substantial thing i've read about it....it amazed
me that most of the "abnormally large vowel inventory of Hebrew" are really
just allophones of the basic Semitic vowel system."
 Well, if you haven't read them already, I highly recommend two very important
articles about the phonology of Biblical Hebrew.

Garr, W. Randall "Interpreting Orthography," pp. 53-80 in The Hebrew Bible and its
Interpreters, Eisenbrauns, 1990. (You may know Randy Garr from his fine book on
the Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine; this is a great article, although
somewhat dense).

Khan, Geoffrey, "The Tiberian pronounciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew," pp. 1-23
in Zeitschrift für Althebraistik 9:1 (1996). This is the method used to teach
Hebrew at Cambridge, and it is *really* painstakingly researched. Geoffrey Khan
(who is known for his work in Neo-Aramaic dialects) used a variety of primary
grammatical sources to reconstruct the pronunciation of the Massoretes.

also, note

Steiner, Richard "Ancient Hebrew" in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics,
vol. 2. Oxford, 1992. Richard Steiner is responsible for proving the existence
of the affricate PS *ts' (Hebrew tzaddi) whereas many philologists before him
were content to assume that the Hebrew pronunciation of tzaddi was an
innovation.

He is also responsible for work on the glottalic/ejective nature of the so-called
"emphatic consonants" in Proto-Semitic; seems that they were originally
ejectives (Hebrew qoph from PS *k' ) which became contaminated by Arabic
pronunciation by the 9th century (when there is evidence that the Massoretes
pronounced these consonants in the back of the throat, like Arabic) so instead
of Tiberian "qof," Ezra probably would have pronounced it k'op (there is also
good evidence for ejectives in Akkadian, and the Ethiopic languages have
ejectives).

Steiner's article is an attempt to explain Ancient Hebrew phonology to linguists, so it
is much more approachable than most of the stuff we philologists turn out.


"One of my conlanging side-projects is a Judean Romance Language, right
now named _Jûdajca_ [juwzajka], a hypothetical language spoken in an
alternate timeline where the Romans flooded Judea with imperial colonists
in order to control it, but the colonists ended up assimilating into the
Judean population and their language became the vernacular, developing
such Hebraic features such as bege"d-kefe"t (like the softened [z] in
the language's name) and emphatic consonants."


I have heard of the begedkefet spirantization described as an Areal Feature,
shared by Hebrew and Aramaic. Some other features of the region that you might
consider for your Judean romance language are #w which goes to /j/ (e.g. Arabic
"walada," but Hebrew "yeled," Old Aramaic and Phoenician YLD) (virgina goes to
jirgina? Valens goes to Jalens? Looks a little silly, I know) and Junctural
Doubling, which occurs in NorthWest Semitic and, interestingly enough, Italian
(one of my profs joked that this is the influence of Punic upon Italian).

As a kid I was exposed to a lot of dialect from my mother's family, which comes,
for the most part, from the area around Naples. I had little idea that most of
it wasn't English, and continued to use a lot of the dialect cuss words and
food names in speech until I learned better (eg. "scooge," from Neap.
"scuccia," and "gavadil," It. "cavatelli.") Surprisingly, I discovered that
Napuletan represents most of the doubling in writing - most people are familiar
with the Cottrau's version of "Lo Varcajuolo de Santa Lucia," which is written
in an Italianized version of this dialect:

"Comme se fricceca/ La luna chiena!/ Lo mare ride/ L'aria e' serena;/ Vuie che
ffacite/ Mmiez'a a la via?/ Santa Lucia!/ Santa Lucia!

"Sto vicalo frisco/ Fa resciatare/ Chi vo spassarese/ Jenno ppe mmare:/ E' pronta,
e llesta/ La varca mia/ Santa Lucia!/ Santa Lucia!" and so on...

Junctural Doubling is also a fascinating (IMO) characteristic of Biblical Hebrew; note
that, for example, the energic particle "nna" is often written with a dagesh in
the nun. T.O. Lambdin has hypothesized that the origin for the definite article
in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic lies in this phenomenon (the definite article is
not a common Central Semitic phenomenon; Ugaritic, for example, does not have
one).

Have you seen Origen's samples of transliterated Hebrew in his Hexapla, made
sometime around the 4th century? It is very different from the Tiberian Hebrew
we all know and love.

I'd be interested in learning more about Judajca; to what time period does Judajca
belong? I'm working on a Semitic language right now which was thoroughly
Romanized (it belongs to the 3rd century C.E.), a "mirror image of Judajca" if
you will. If you get a chance to read any of those articles let me know what
you think of them.

-Chollie



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